Crankshaft's Sketchbook

Updates. Doing all this tight stuff is burning me out so I've decided to include some looser sketches in my routine.











Anatomy studies. But I want to draw cars.

Lots updates. Not too much work for myself, been mainly busy helping others with tutorials and critiques.

Scary anatomy is scary. Scary.








Vehicles are awesome. Just loose sketches from imagination.







So I'm working on giving the same treatment with the rear of the tank and ran into a lot of design problems. The back middle part made no sense. It originally was supposed to be a bed for cargo/supplies but it was unclear. Plus it made the turret awkwardly exposed. It also created a lot of value/overlapping headaches. So I gave it a large engine instead, which makes better sense and the large scale adds to the heavy duty feeling of the tank.

Before


Now

I also did a tutorial for someone on kit bashing. Super excited to do more with this new workflow/technique. I sort of like the design of the ship and I haven't even spent 100 years on it yet. Just going to leave it more as a concept piece ie guessing at the perspective etc.

Kit bashing is a powerful production technique used by concept artists to generate ideas quickly and efficiently, since time is money.
Basically you take parts of anything (be it brush strokes, old paintings, photos etc) and collage them together to build something unified.
You turn the chaos (via painting on top, lassoing, transforming etc) into cool shapes and eventually a final design.
This technique is powerful and when my mentor showed it to me it literally changed my world. It triggers/induces happy accidents and ideas that would otherwise be impossible to achieve on your own.
It's similar to looking at clouds. No 2 people are going to see the same things in one cloud. This is bc our brains are very good at seeing cool shapes when they are presented to us. These shapes would hard to come up on our own.
But there is a flaw: You need to have some visual library and knowledge of your design/subject matter. If you know nothing about air planes then it'll just be chaos to chaos. So you still need references.
The easier and fastest approach is to use random photos that match your specs. But start by planning and doing roughs.
For the demo I'll do a simple ship. I want an aggressive ship with lots of sharp diagonals and it has to be very aerodynamic. The more specific you are now the better. It'll save lots of headaches and time later.
So using my knowledge and visual library of cars I know that Lamborghinis are very fast aggressive cars. If you want to make something old and retro you could use steam trains. If you want something boxy and slow you could use school buses etc.
Put a black value layer set to color on top of your layer stack and do everything in bw. This will make it much easier to see cool forms.
The first part is the most fun, hard and depressing part.
It's fun bc you are building a world from chaos. It's depressing bc everything is a mess.
It's hard bc you are juggling design, proportion, perspective (you can make perspective easier by doing the ships in side views) function, rendering etc all at once. But it's not really as hard as it looks bc everything is given to you. You just organize the mess.

Updates. Super tired these days but here's some junk.

Tank rear wip. Struggling a bit with separating the values and the reflective surfaces.



Kit bash ship wip.





Anatomy disaster.

you´re nailing the hard surface stuff, a scott robertson fan?

Some updates. Not as much progress as I'd like, been busy fixing other people's cars I'm also feeling a lot more burnt out these days.

Tank rear. I think the values are getting better?



Kit bash ship wip.



Disaster.









Visual library study of a night vision head set. Sort of gave up towards the end.

Mr. wrote:

you´re nailing the hard surface stuff, a scott robertson fan?

Thanks man! Yea he's one of my biggest heros! Along with Feng Zhu and many more. Let me know if you need any technical help.

crankshaft wrote:

Mr. wrote:

you´re nailing the hard surface stuff, a scott robertson fan?

Thanks man! Yea he's one of my biggest heros! Along with Feng Zhu and many more. Let me know if you need any technical help.

MR. ROBERTSON IS GOD,MAN. i learned a lot from the perspective basics video, im more into characters and creatures stuff ,but i want to get the book where he condenses everything from the videos , i have it in pdf but is not good quality scan, you need to get the real deal.

No progress as usual. Struggle is real.

Omg why does everything I draw look like a car?? Why?? But yeah I've butchered the Ferrari Laferrari. It's a hybrid with a v12 engine Must steal those forms!!! gogoggo





Tank rear. Something feels off, like the values or too much texture? I did fall into that trap of over detailing so I've actually eliminated some details.



Kit bash wip. Struggling with the design of those rear wing tips.

Mr. wrote:

crankshaft wrote:

Mr. wrote:

you´re nailing the hard surface stuff, a scott robertson fan?

Thanks man! Yea he's one of my biggest heros! Along with Feng Zhu and many more. Let me know if you need any technical help.

MR. ROBERTSON IS GOD,MAN. i learned a lot from the perspective basics video, im more into characters and creatures stuff ,but i want to get the book where he condenses everything from the videos , i have it in pdf but is not good quality scan, you need to get the real deal.

Yea man I definitely recommend it. You can try amazon it's not that expensive. Also I recommend Successful drawing by Loomis and Vanishing point by Jason Cheeseman. Those 3 books will teach you almost everything about perspective. Let me know if you need any more help!