Crankshaft's Sketchbook

The vehicles are looking pretty neat Crank.
As far as your frustration goes with the accuracy/lively issue I think we all suffer somewhat from the same problem. I think if you continue to work in both ways then you will discover a happy medium (I've not discovered it yet but I'm assured its out there).
Your more free flowing sketches will continue to improve with regard to accuracy and the more comfortable you become with rendering and the use of colour the more spontaneous it will become.

Thanks Val! Attempting to make the fur deeper but it's very hard. I've re done the assignment about 6-7 times. If this doesn't work I'm throwing in the towel and I think an important part of learning is knowing when to accept your limitations.



Thanks Atto! Loosening up is a constant struggle for me. I have piles of design sketches in my traditional sb but they're so messy to present. At the same time that's when I'm the most loose. Just gotta keep practicing.

Updates.

Finally calling this car done. There are a few things missing ie the mirrors, wipers etc but this was just a study. Learned lots and had lots of fun.



Anatomy fail. Going for more gestural and organic figures.





Mech update. Still planning things out. Playing around with texture as well. Tell me what you think.

So after watching Feng Zhu's video on what to draw he talked a lot about design vs making pretty artwork. He talked about how crappy design sketches that show thinking, iteration, problem solving are better for your career than technically strong work. I normally don't post these but here is a another personal wip. I'm designing a cab over gas truck.

I started with research by drawing cab over trucks in different views and reverse engineered them. They look easy but are deceptively hard. Look carefully at the door and how the driver gets in. Look at how the front bumper attaches. Look at how high the truck is. Then I added some my own design ideas on top of something that's grounded. Still much to do before anything is clear. Anyways this is probably just another excuse to post more stuff. I love sketching! So many ideas but I gotta focus on fundamentals. Argh!!!!

Updates. Progress has been all over the placed as usual. I've been mainly modelling in Sketchup and it's super fun! Sp easy to use and soo powerful.

Some (presentable) messy sketches on my cab over gas truck. Really excited to clean up the perspective and flesh it out eventually. I love sketching because I can really loosen up but then they turn into chicken scratch.



Update on my spider mech. This taught me a lot about loosening up. My layer stack is under 10 layers and painting/drawing feels so much more natural! Critique at will. The legs will be model in Sketchup then painted over. Since I recently started using Sketchup my workflow will be a bit back and forth.



Anatomy fail.



Schoolism update. Working on the hair. I finally got the fur to (somewhat) work!

Updates. Just some excuses to post. Now that I'm done designing the gas truck I'm attempting to design my own formula one car.









Finally calling this done. Spent a long time on it and I could nit pick some more but I did my best.



The fail is strong in this one.

Those truck sketches look good. I like that one (from a few posts back) that shows it from a low angle. Your pictures often show machines from a higher, more distant viewpoint so it's good to see you trying out some new perspectives as it can offer new insights into the subject and mood.
Your Sketchups look nice and detailed too and are accurate renderings of your initial drawing.

And well done for persevering with the fur. I like the shapes you've got in those longer hairs. I'd still like to see you loosen up a little with the body fur but I know you were well out of your comfort zone with this and it takes a lot of dedication to stick with it like you did. Respect.

More messy design sketches. You don't want to see the rest, they're even messier. Can't wait to model these out and flesh them even more.

Side view of the gas cab over truck.



Rough proportions of the upcoming formula one car.



Electrical generator and crate.



Cleaned up that truck sketch. This is the end result I'm going for. I want to strike a happy balance between accuracy (I eye balled perspective), design, and looseness with some rendering. I redesigned it with a safari function, so it has bull bars around the lights and gas tank for cross country driving. I didn't merely copy the ref, I broke it down to understand the mechanical anatomy because I'll be doing a sci fi version soon.

Thanks Val! The next subject is even harder ><. The task is to paint skin, something I've never done before. The fur assignment was very hard but I learned a lot from something that I'll probably never draw in the future.

Update on the mech. Realizing that I make things too low contrast so I experimented with going a bit overboard with the contrast.



Rough model of the mech in sketchup. There's lot of problems here. The legs are too skinny, there's not a lot of movement for the legs, the centre of gravity is too high etc.





Mock up of the legs over the 2d painting. Realized that there are some perspective errors, probably a result of using such complicated shapes. I was off by a few mm and it snow balled big time.

Finally came up with my own design of the formula one car. Was going for a slightly futuristic design while still looking current. Going to eventually model it out and render/paint over but that will wait. Wheels were added in ps because it's too tedious to even rough in by hand.