Crankshaft's Sketchbook

Thanks Val! I love injecting these things to bring the art to life.

Updates! Finished the crate! Woo hoo! Took much less time than my spider mech! Anyways time to go back to my stock and flesh out another one!

Updates! Signed up for a mentor ship with a professional concept artist and it's pretty awesome. So much wisdom and knowledge but also super scary at the caliber of work.

Fail.







Super loose and rough door sketches for another design piece. I'm fascinated by how water tight ship doors work so I'm going to try and invent my own. Also some ref to show what I mean.

Some design specs:

-Big powerful door, wide, entrance to a dangerous reactor so it must be able to withstand a nuclear meltdown
-strong big hinges
-opens in 2 or 3 parts
-some of the tumblers/locking mechanism must be shown

Updates. Some of my work from my first week with my mentor. We're designing a mech and we chose number 11, 13.Definitely learned some valuable lessons here. He said that I'm more in the realm of industrial design since I like to draw cars and props etc and I tend to use very boring camera angles, primarily the 3/4 angle so I tried to push the camera and horizon line. I also don't give enough attention to bgs that much ie draw a car on a white bg hence my composition and storytelling are non existent. Going to keep sketching and work on those weakspots.







Some thumbs for my door. Same problems here, gotta keep working.



Car sketch. Not happy with this design at all. Too flat and boring shapes. Too predictable and cliche. However I was trying to juggle line quality and design. Arghhh so much to learn. So overwhelming. Plus I'm still trying to get use to pen/marker vs pencil.

Hey Crank, how many hours in a day do you spend practicing?

Some of the anatomy sketches are too bright to see properly, but I really like the sketches on the vault door, particularly the 2nd set, lots of detail and depth in there.

The latest car designs don't look cliche at all but I agree about the flat perspective, that can be easily fixed though, maybe you can go the completely opposite way and make them spherical, could make for an interesting design!

I always watch this video when I'm studying about ship designs, this guy is amazing!

..how did you get a mentor!?

I agree with what you said about camera angles, crank, so It's good to see you trying some more dramatic views. They give a much better sense of scale.
And I really like that car! Especially that second angle. It looks much more dynamic in that one.

Thanks Val! There's so much to learn. Gotta keep going.

Thanks Micro! I've seen that video before and it's great. I spend about 42 hours a week drawing but it's rather broken up and scattered. About 4 hrs a day on weekdays and 18 hrs total weekends.

About the mentor I did some networking on Linked in long before and he decided to add me as a friend. Since then I would politely ask him questions and send him work every long while. Then eventually he realized that I was serious but making slow progress so he decided to mentor me.

More gestures. Tried to include some straighter lines. After these I'll go back and reread previous crits and do more Hampton/Loomis studies.

So lately I've been frustrated and I realized that the problem has been under my nose the whole time: I focus too much on perfection such as function or accuracy ie getting the perspective right. That's probably why I always defaulted to the 3/4 camera view, since it easier to handle perspective. I worried too much about making mistakes that everything stiffened up and my stuff just died. So now I've loosened up by not caring what happens and the results are much more lively!

Some mechanical environments. Definitely plan on doing more. Loads of mistakes but also loads of fun! They're slightly edited in photoshop ie making them darker but I plan on leaving them raw. I've learned many valuable lessons recently. Acknowledging and leaving mistakes builds discipline and restraint. If I simply fixed everything in ps afterwards then that defeats the purpose.

Updates. Some of these sketches are actually quite small (3 in by 5 in) but I blew up them for clarity. Trying to practice more dynamic angles and compositions. I think these are showing improvement.



Loads of mistakes here but I'm calling the door design done.

Crank, I think these are awesome - a very nice story board feel to them. I can begin to see now much more of the style of your design and I like it. It reminds me of the type of technology in the Alien movies.
Good stuff mate - I think you may be really finding your 'voice' here - keep it up.