Crankshaft's Sketchbook

Finally finished lesson 4 of the schoolism assignment. This was really hard, particularly understanding and rendering the glass. I re did the handle 4 times and it looks completely wrong ><. Anyways time to move on.



Some heads. I realized that I jumped to soon to features and I'll go back to the major masses. At first I thought doing heads would be kind of pointless then I realized that I could use that skill for doing military helmets. Now I'm excited.



Sketch of a mech from my sb. Sketching is my favorite form of drawing. I could sketch forever. I have pages of these design sketches but I don't usually post them because they're so messy and misleading. I usually forego fundamentals in exchange for expediency for these sketches.

Updates. Currently reading some color books and they mention using the Munsell color wheel. Messing around with color touches and complements on the mech. Still lots to do. Also attempting to play with warm and cool notes. Eg the shadow.



Some heads.



Car rendering wip over Scott Robertson's line drawing. I want to go straight to practice rendering the Fresnel effect and not worry about design so I thought it'll be better to use line work that's not mine. You can get the resources off his How to Render site.

I went to the Canadian War museum and it was just awesome! Took like 100 pictures of great tanks and military stuff. It's like mecha heaven! I may post some of those pictures with an upcoming tip/tutorial. In the meanwhile, progress has been all over the place. Here's some studies on deep texture/fur for my schoolism assignment. I couldn't really understand the lectures so I had to take a step back and do these studies. Also some heads and a rough sketch based on an aircraft carrier, the USS Enterprise from WW2 (not star trek). I treat my traditional sb as an inventory of ideas and the sketches will be fleshed out eventually. How do you lips in perspective?

Update on my car render.

I like the mech with the warm shadow area underneath. Those changes in colour really do make it pop out of the screen with extra dimension.

Your work on doing lips in perspective is progressing but is slightly inconsistent. Each individual sketch gets a few of the different things right, you just need to capture all of them in a single sketch. It's just a question of practice and concentration and you certainly have the skill for both of those things.
As you're so good at mechanical perspective then perhaps you should think of the way the mouth relates to the other features by picturing the rectangle formed by the corners of the mouth and the centre of the eyes. As long as you keep this rectangle aligned with the centre line of the face then you should have the right framework to get the lips in place.

Thanks Val! So much to learn and do. Just never enough hours in a day. So now I have another dilemma (one problem to another ). I realize a big problem with the original color palette that it wasn't appropriate. I mean baby blue for a military vehicle? What was I thinking? So I came up with another one. Because blue is strongest at a dark local value that means it's harder to see form changes and therefore it feels a bit flatter than the original. It also lost some of the detailed look, due to values being compressed and merging together. Is there a way to bring back some of those details without changing the local values to something lighter? Should I change the local values of individual details? Wouldn't that make things more noisy? Or does it look fine the way it is?



Fur studies. These are precursors to the schoolism assignment. I just can't understand how to do it yet. Probably should of used harder brush strokes.

Some more heads. Still focusing on the underlying structure. Also a train sketch from my sb that doesn't look like chicken scratch. I really want to clean these up but I need to focus on my schoolism, studies and spider mech.

Little update on my spider mech.

Hey guys I really need some advice. So regarding my spider mech I got some critique saying that is was too detailed so I did a another quick po with less detail. I admit after some work that it is too detailed but it now it feels too cliche and almost cartoony in design.

There's still lots to do, occlusion shadows, reflected light etc. I'm mainly worried about the design. I was told that it has too many nooks and crannies (particularly around the back) and that it;s "over designed" but I'm not sure if that's an actual flaw or matter of taste.

Here are some mechs from pros I've looked at. Seeing their work/details confused me even more.









Over detailing is such a big problem of mine, how does one avoid it? I flip the canvas, work zoomed out, try to have areas of rest etc but nothing ever looks too detailed to me. In fact the cleaner version feels almost naked or barren to me. Anyways thanks!

Crank,
I think there's several issues here.
Firstly the type of feedback you're getting might not be that helpful. Some people are quite inarticulate when it comes to giving critique on a work. How often have you seen posts (on other sites, not this glorious corner of the net obviously) where people simply type a negative comment with very little explanation of their thoughts behind it. Or conversely a positive comment like 'wow', 'beautiful' or my personal favourite 'nice'. While it is flattering to receive any comments by other people on our work and especially positive ones I find it often very limited in terms of practical use to my development as an artist. The majority of people who leave such comments are not doing it to be purposefully vague or obtuse but are normally somewhat uneducated in how to articulate an opinion to provide the kind of help we are looking for as developing artists. It is perhaps due to our nature as visual animals that we feel more inclined to pass judgement on the visual arts than to do so on literature or poetry.
Design is a complicated issue and projecting our vision of how future design may be influenced is even trickier. As I'm sure you're aware design has to work. There exists a more practical framework around which we can establish 'rules' to judge an item as well or poorly designed. When designing anything, whether for immediate manufacture or as a vision of what may possibly come, good design should always ask 'how'. How would this be constructed? How do I articulate this particular item in this particular way? How does this spider mech function? A lecturer of mine once told me that the difference between a designer and an artist is the difference between How and Why (a little simplistic I know but then he was a craftsman and believed his job was to bridge this difference).
I guess your job, in working up this spider mech is to answer both the how and the why. Perhaps go back to the original posters of the critique and ask for more clarification.
I guess the biggest issue here though is how you and the critics view your image. A lot of people would view your current work as a finished piece, the culmination of all your study and skill up to this point. This, I would guess, is not how you would view it. While partially true I would assume you also see it as a progression and the jumping off point for your future work, an aside which, while you hope will stand alone as a work of its own merit, is more about your development than your destination.
I guess what I'm saying is while some people will judge your image based on the design some will judge it on how you articulate your ideas visually, try to decipher who's doing what. Some people will leave you considered opinion, some will go "Wow, oooooh, ahhh!" or "uuugh! crap" and some will have their own agenda for posting a comment. Learn from the first, consider the second then forget about it and wipe your backside on the last. Some people will misunderstand your intention, try to consider how they view your work but dont get hung up on it.
Your making good progress so keep going. After all we're not painting the Sistine Chapel here, we're laying the foundations upon which we build the walls, rest the ceiling and finally paint our masterwork.

Whew, that was longer than I intended but I hope it helps. I need to lie down for a bit