Figure Drawing Week 06

This week we focused on the muscles of the lower arm:

John Berkey - Perspective Assignment

I chose this work of art from John Berkey to recreate for our perspective practice this week:

I then took this painting and placed it into Maya in an image plane to reference for some proxy box modeling. I also placed a blue plane behind the scene and set a very light blue directional light to give me an idea of how the light hit the surfaces.

Finally, I put this render into Photosop and painted over it, keeping the original up for extra reference, and using loose gesture strokes to focus more on the general shape and location of the objects, rather than focusing on small details.

John Berkey Reference Board

This week we gathered references of John Berkey paintings for our assignment on perspective.

Cannon Sculpting in Zbrush 02

This is the second sculpted half of the cannon from before, this time with the wood grain carved out. We imported "orb" brushes that had a lot of cracks and crevices to sculpt or drag onto the mesh to give more of a woody, grain texture. We also learned to use the render function instead of just snipping out a screenshot this time.

I myself am fond of the Rake brush, and used it quite a lot on a low Z-intensity to go over the wooden planks several times to get a solid base down, so that I could then go over it with smaller, more detailed brushes for splits and cuts in the wood.

Figure Drawing Week 05

This week we worked on the anatomy of the hands and upper arms, with a new, female model.

For the last drawing, George suggested I try  making a gesture of the figure with charcoal and darker gestures in the outer, negative space, making only a few single lines to create the shape of the figure. At first this seemed complicated, but I really liked how it felt after a while to get loose with the drawing and not worry about making a mess.

Artist Study: Drew Struzan, Composition

This week we focused on composition by looking at movie posters he's done. I chose this unused Harry Potter movie poster art:

My best guess for the composition style in this picture would be something like a radial set up, with the focus on Harry  and leading out with the smaller characters.
This was my initial sketch for placement blocking:

Then I did some overall lining to try and refine the shapes:

And added some flat color for blocking:

Then I went to work on adding shadows, highlights, cleaned up color areas, glowing effects, and cleaned up some of the line work for the final picture:

Tech Art Lighting and Material Instance Creation Assignment

This week we focused on lighting a scene and creating materials. We were to take the provided scene and light two rooms and a hallway. Then we had to create a parent material with parameters and create children instances to manipulate and add onto imported bumping pub assets, from the previous assignment.

 Only one light, aside from the directional light, was supposed to cast shadows as a stationary light. I chose one of the fireplaces.