Aims for today

Today i aim to start to put my lovely robot creation onto a background, into a concept painting. I have plans that it will be put up against a 'sunset or sunrise' sky, as the purple and gold clash will bring it out a bit more, it will also make it so that shadows will be more visible, allowing more room to build in atmosphere. I will frame it in a nice Arch to help composition, i have obtained a couple of tutorials on composition which i hope will help me.

My strategy is to first open it up on Illustrator and make a black and white outline sketch, like a cell in a comic book, no shading whatsoever. Then i hope to bring it into Painter X and invert it so that it is mainly black with white outlines for all the detail, like a voodoo painting, then i hope to shade the image in negatively, then adding colour.

Final Painting1

This is my painting of my Ravana-themed sentry robot, designed for guarding the temples or attacking the invading English, this monstrosity uses psychology as it's foremost weapon, it only has to eradicate the fools stupid enough to face it, and those who run spread the rumours and strike fear into the rest of the invading troops. So far it has only 6 arms, quite a bit short of the intended 22 the original Ravana is supposed to have had, but i could intrduce some more. I decided it would have to have smaller arms near the weapons designed to reload the guns when they run out of ammo (Which it does regularly as the pesky English come in their thousands!)



The image i took from the thumbnails i made in all it's terrifying glory. I spent about 7 hours on this, done entirely on Corel Painter, it shows how i am trying to break away from the cliched worl of photoshop and jumping into the more superior painting program.

Overall i am satisfied with the way it came out, i like the way it's body resembles a chicken (the legs are supposed to resemble 'Pan' or Faun) a but it has human heads, i like the way i tackled the problem of including ten heads without making it's neck area a mess, if only i could do the same with the arms, (It is supposed to have 22 of them!)

Aims for the Chistmas Holidays

The christmas holidays will be more based on creating images for this competition, i also wish to re-address the robotic elephant ideas and recreate them using PainterX or Illustrator. I shall also practice putting my creations into environments which make sense.
The research i shall be doing will mainly be into composition, light and other painting techniques. It will also be quite useful to go and do some landscape painting of my own.
I also wish to get my Dissretation well underway, opting for a strategy where i do each part bit by bit.

Tutorial

I have aquired a couple of Gnomon tutorial Dvds to help me with my robot design. I was previously modelling but i think the model i started on was going slightly pear shaped so i decided to go back to the drawing board and start again acording to wht the tutorial told me to. The one i saw was by Feng Zhu who showed me how to refine a robot desing through the use of thumbnail sketches, working quickly and without much attention to detail while maintaining the confidence that these drawings are not meant to be seen by anyone but myself, i can go through a variety of many designs and come out with something inventive after going through all the other options.
I chose to use a different technique to what Feng Showed in the tutorial, opting to design my creation one part at a time and carrying my favourate ideas along with me. As you can see, this design process shows a very dramatic change in style and the progression shown is very pronounced. This was because part way through the tutorial Fen showed us designing the figures from silhuetes, which i found to be a very useful and effective way to go about things.

books

Following a recent visit back home to my parents, i was able to increase the size of my books library by a couple of new issues, one book my mother brought me as she thought it would be of great help. She wasn't wrong so i included it in my research. The other book is a Comic book written by Deepak Chopra and published by Virgin comics, a company which has a range of comic books infused with Indian culture. This comic follows a similar theme to my own idea in that it is set during the era of colonial India and is written from an Indian perspective, it conveys the attitudes the Indians had against the English oppressors and the resistance put up by the people. It also has some very beautiful images of the hindu goddess Kali in all her fury. I found the Images to be of very useful reference and the issues about 'sorcery' and the supernanur

The other book my mom brought me as she thought it would be of great help. She wasn't wrong so i included it in my research. It was called Indian Style and featres a great variety of modern photographs showing interior, exterior and landscape environments around northern India. These will be very useful when i come to do my environements, even though my setting is during the nineteenth century, some of the more recent looking photographs may give a sort of futuristic feel, adding a flare of science fiction.

competition

Okay, so now i have opted totake part in the CG society competition i thought it would be very useful if i took a look at the competition to see what else has been produced, see if it is all 3d or if there is something i am doing wrong, i took a look at some of the rather impressive submitions on the site, although i would not be able to post them up here as i haen't had permission to host them on my blog, i did however think i could make them too small to make out, that way the artist's remains copyright remains unbroken.

This one is by Iban Egana, and shows Ghenghis Khan returning with a bit more sophisticated weaponry, lots of Horse mounted guns, the return of cavalry to the battlefield.

Starting modelling

I have started to model my Ravana creation in Silo, the competition has prizes for modelling so i thought i would make a model and then take a render and paint over it using the perspective and the dimensions allready mapped out for me. I thought i would try to simplify it a bit, without texturing it, the important thing is the painting afterwards, but it would be nice to win the prize for modelling. Like with the model i made last year, i make the various parts before fixing them all up together, here is a screenshot.

As you can see it is still quite early yet, i am still trying to think of a decent pose to put my figure in.

London Visit

My trip to Bridewells museum was a bit of a failure as i had forgotten my XD card so i was limited to only four photographs, but i was eager to get my own phtographs of vintage machinery. I went to London on Wednesday to take photographs of the vintage machinery they have there. I was debating whether to go or not that morning as i had overslept, but in the end i decided to go along with it and aarrived at Liverpool street station at about 3 o clock in the aftre noon, leaving me with three hours before the museum would close. I took the tube to South Kensington and found i wans't very far from the Science museum, so i went inside and started to photograph all the machinery i found which i thought would be relevent to my study.

It's a competition!

http://features.cgsociety.org/challenge/steampunk/index.php

Okay, this comptition changes everything, i took a look and thought it was right up my street, i'd be a fool not to enter. I have a pretty good idea as well. I am going to produce an image, a model which i will render into a image and paint untill i have created my own Mona Lisa, the one painting which all my previous works are the finger paintings of a toddler compared to what i have in mind. Anyway, this is my idea...

Meet Ravana, the ten headed, twenty armed demon from the Ramayana, the epic poem about Rama, the seventh Avatar of Vishnu, prince of Ayodhya, who's wife Sita gets abducted by the Demon king of Lanka, Ravana, who is defeated by Rama and his army of Monkeys. I have been looking at the ways in which to depict Ravana as the giant robotic creation of a Mad Monk which poses the initial question of how to depict the ten haeds and still make it clear what it is. My idea was to use a giant ball which floats above where his head should be, which is covered in faces. The faces will resemble those found on statues all across India, and the ball will spin in all directions. Each face will have it's own personality.

Here are some initial drawings i have made.

Elephant attempt 1

This is the elephant i have started to paint, it's not finished yet, i need to do all the complicated mechanical bits, the boilers, pistons, gears and chimney that makes up the engline of the elephant. It's main purpose is psychological warfare, it strikes fear into the hearts of it's enemies. I should be making my way down to London this Wednesday and making my way to the science museum to get some nice reference photos which i can use for the belly area of this robot.

Deities

I also did some research online, i found loads of stuff on the religions practiced throughout the subcontinent, this was probably because they were all trying to sell their religion to the public so they put up loads of information about what they believe and who they worship. There are so many religions practiced in India, somewhere between 4 or 5 were founded there with hinduism as the most dominent.

A few of the Hindu gods, there are many hundreds more.

'Phants

Now i have been doing some designs for my elephant. I looked at the anatomy of the Indian elephant and i also looked at some of the armor they would have dressed he elephants in all those years ago. these images show some of the research into elephant anatomy i have been looking into.

Mughal elephant armor, the only surviving suit of elephant armor in the world.

I used these pictures and based the frame of my mechanical elephant idea on the skeleton of the elephant, i based the head on some of the collossal helmets made for the armored elephants.

Machines

Now i finally have some drawing up, i've been busy researching and now i finally have some of my own images. These images show some early machines i have been looking at as practice for drawing machinery. I have a wide range of machines some of which will be more usefull than others.

This shows a steam engine at the Bridewells museum in Norwich.

This steam engine i found in a book

This is from a steam engine cabin i found in a book.

This is more of an industrial scene from the same book i got the previous images from.