Week Seven

This week in life drawing you may notice that we spent a good bit of time dividing the subject's body into a series of boxes and joints. The first, fourth and fifth images were drawn using this method to help gage the proportions and nature of the stance in a time efficient manner, and I must admit that in some instances this helped a lot. We were only given 6 minutes for each of these drawings, and I have been known to rarely complete the figure in 20, but as you can see here, the illustartions are of a realistic enough standard and the proportions have been captured with minimal time wasted. My favourite example of this process at work is the very first image, as it shows the subject demonstrating a pose used less than most, from an angle that complements it - by building the body from blocks at the torso and hips, the arch of the subject's back began to form well. As you can see, with this method there's hardly any time for any attempt at decent markmaking as the main focus is to quickly capture the physicality, but perhaps this can be applied to sessions with a longer timescale as well.

The 2 central images were done in sessions ranging between 15 and 20 minutes, and looking back at them now, I have to say that while I am closer to meeting my aim of completing the figure, I feel that it has come at the cost of some of the detail. If you look back at some of the life drawings from earlier weeks you will find that, although they depict a smaller section of the body, they surpass this week's in terms of shading, detail and the general confidence in markmaking. Though the proportions are more or less quite accurate, and the small amount of shading that I started on the central image is pleasing, I would have liked to have spent a little more time with this aspect. Depending on how things go, I may return to my previous pace of drawing next week to achieve my preferred look.

This week marked the beginning of the sentry gun project, in which we must produce a 3D model of a turret individually over the course of 5 weeks. In the above image to will see a selection of turret imagery I deemed visually pleasing, indicating the general direction I wanted to take with this project - generally curved and classically space-age! Despite this, my mood board is not merely limited to turrets - I have also included some images of classic sports cars which don similar asthectic features, along with an alien cruiser that could be mistaken for a gun at a distance.

After cherry-picking these pictures, I manipulated and silhouetted some of them to form the basis for a bash kit, which you can see on the right. This kit included many aspects of turret architecture including barrels, legs, midsections, pivots, and some extras (some were simply labelled as "chunks", and generally had no visual implication as to what they were, but could help to build the overall shape of the gun) Some of the silhouettes were taken directly from the images on the left, with a few being manipulated beforehand to achieve the ideal orthographic angle. This said, I made sure that I only used them to form the basis of my shapes, rather than letting them define them completely.

So here are the 15 thumbnails that I bashed together. One of the first things you'll notice is that there is plenty of variety in the silhuoettes - they don't all follow one single motif, and that's partly on purpose. I decided to create a mixture of both sleek, Halo-style ones and more machined-looking military ones so that I could make the decision for myself based on what worked best. Making this sort of decision before you start your thumbnails probably isn't going to get you a very wide spectrum of results, so I kept my options open and left the selection process until after they were all completed. The silhouettes that jumped out to me as the strongest were numbers 3, 4, 5, 9, 10 and 12, but I showed the designs to friends and a great deal were fond of number 7, a design I'd dubbed the "Longtooth". Although I felt like the Longtooth was one of the stronger silhouettes whilst I was assembling it, looking at it among the other candidates opened my eyess up to just how stylised it is - proportions like that simply would not work in real life - way too chunky!

I eventually settled on design number 9, the Kraken, which was also popular with my friends. The shape seems very well balanced, and I really like the way that the neck seems to become the supporting back leg as it gets lower down, as well as how the spindly front leg compliments it. I'm happy with this choice, and hey, while it was partially made out of ripped-up pieces of other turrets, its design is very much its own.

I used the rest of the week to flesh out the specifics of the Kraken, as when modelling I will need to know more information than just the shape of the outline. Taking the designs of other firearms into consideration, I assembled an orthographic blueprint of the turret which clearly shows how the pieces are all defined, putting andend to the mystery of where all the dints and divisions in the silhouette come from. We now have key information on the Kraken - we can see that it has a large barrel housed in between the 2 main curved panels of the body, and we also know how the legs and neck area will operate. Completing this step has brought me that little bit closer to the design and will definately make it easier to realise during the modelling process, which I hope to start next week.