What a character!

While i was making the sunset piece, i was also working on some character designs for the pilot of the airship, whther or not this is the protagonist or antagonist or whether he is important or not i am unclear about. I just thought, Sky pirate, Indian and culturally mixed as he travels around a lot.

I made a line up of potential characters and chose elements i like from bits of them. and finalised a simple orthographic .He is based on some of the things i like about my lineup of possible character, the trench coat makes him look a bit like a cowboy, which goes with the fairly simple style underneath. I believe i have yet to outfit him with jewelry, which would be essential for any self respecting pirate captain just returning from Thailand with a cargo of stolen goods.

sunset painting

I have recently been working on this painting of my airship flying into a harbor against a sunset. I used my model a little bit to get a sense of lighting for the airship but the sky, horizon and sea i made myself on Painter. I learned a lot about colour as i tried to keep the pallette limited to a few browns and purples and oranges.

making models and painting over the tp of them.

Again i am working on two pieces at the same time, i have been using the 3d models as a basis to get the shadows and the perspective right as that seemed to work wuite well with the previous one. My idea is to include a character on my boat deck painting so i have done some character designs to work on my strength as i have been told i feel great empathy with the characters i design
. I watched a Gnomon workshop DVD by BaRonTIerI about character design and so i made a 'line up' of characters on Silo and rendered them to be painted over


While i was doing this, i also made a quick model of my ship on Silo and rendered in on Maya, i then took it into painter where i proceded to paint it in perspective based on another Gnomon workshop dvd i saw by Ryan Church. I had a specific light source in mind for my next painting. I put this perspective painting into my previous painting on the orthographic of the boat designs before hand, then i proceded to paint a nice landscape for my boat to exist in.

Interior design

I used a combination of Painter and Photoshop to paint my room as i had stated in my learning agreement that i would rely more on other programs, however the comuters in the studio do not have painter so i had to make do with what they had. I drew a lot from the Indian Style book i had from the first term. I wanted a lot of colours, especially for the band where i wanted the viewer to be drawn to first.
So this is the image i made. The 3d model i made helped a lot with the perspective and the lighting, however, the faces were a problem. I did the whole image in the wrong resolution, the resolution was far too low for me to get the faces right. I used the image of Rama i used as a framed picture as a reference for the faces. Unfortunately there seems to be an uploading error everytime i try to upload the next image so i will have to come back to this later.

Room

Next i had an idea for a way to get character, props and environment design all in one, I would make a room full of people interacting with objects. It was a great way to explore perspective and more importantly try out a new strategy i had in mind to help with the perspective. While painting the ship deck painting i thought it would save a lot of time if i simply made a model of my ship and had the perspective worked out for me allready, so instead of spending hours drawing lines across my canvas i made up my room in the Silo program where i spent two days extruding polygons to the shape i wanted for my room. I even made some simple human figure shapes to go in the picture.

I then uploaded it into Maya where i was able to add lighting effects to get the lighting right for my painting. With a chandalier in the middle of the room i decided to use that as the light source and painted the shadows in around it.

Boatings

So i proceded to paint my designs. The Orthographic i did mostly when i was at home with my family on Photoshop, largely from my imagination and from a wooden board texture i found instantly on Google for the wood, and a canvas texture for the zeppelins.
I then used an old paper texture for the background, the one i used for the logo of my project and gave it a nice border which i feel presented it in a very nice way, making it look like a design document from the time it came from. My next aim is to get a painting of the ship in perspective for the bottom left hand corner and write some notes about the design of the ship in caligraphy around the designs.

The other image i was working on at the same time i did mostly after the Easter break as the vanishing point tool stopped working on my parent's computer. I used some of the same textures for it as the image i was working on at the same time.
I came back to this one later to add shadows lighting and even characters to give the image more atmosphere. I was also a bit concerned that it seemed a very brown afair with very little other colour. Blue and brown seems like a trend that has been used again and again in most of my works this term so i had in mind a background which shows the sea, the sky and the horizon the ship is sailing towards.
I added this background and a person and a lot of light and shadows and i believe the results are a lot better as the result.
My next idea is to put my character design idea in the foreground of the piece to mask the are in the bottom right where not a lot is going on . Overall i beleive this piece to be quite effective with the shadows.

What heppened next?

I was then stuck about what to do next, i had my heart set on an airship which my character would use to do piracy with, this was during the Easter break when i was at home with my family. I don't normally work very well under those conditions as i don't like to be disturbed while i work, but i kept going with it anyway.

I started two paintings at the same time, but as they both related to each other i think it worked quite well and it kept me going, stopped me from slacking and wondering what to do next. I wanted to do this ship from two very different angles, one from on the deck and a well presented orthographic painting. Before i started however i did a bit of research into oriental boats to give me an idea of how to integrate a sense of the exotic into my design, so i looked at dhows, Baghlahs and Chinese junks. The arabic Dhow style would have been most commonly used in the ports of india at the time, and pretty much used all over the Indian ocean.
I didn't feel i needed to make a lot of thumbnails for the design of my ship, i did a couple in my sketch book before deciding on one i liked from what i didn't like from all the ones i drew, a small and light one, i had a choice between an airship and a sea ship, so i decided, why not both!

My idea is a small dhow with a few zepelins and two fold out wings to help it into the air, it can take off vertically like a hot air balloon or it can take a run up, just like a Harrier Jump Jet.