Brunel Watercolours

Yesterday started as a very stressful day, after having to stay up till 5:30 to get a lab report done, I then had to get up at 8 to finish the report and get to the days lectures. So suffice to say at the end of the day I wanted a way to unwind so, see how it was a glorious day I decided to head out on a walk around campus with some equipment to see if I could find a spot for some watercolours. Sure enough I found a nice spot and, just as the sun was beginning to set, spent an hour doing these two paintings.

Two postcard size studies of part of Brunel University. I must say I really enjoyed doing both of these. I was able to fully relax for the first time in ages, sitting in an idyllic spot under a willow beside the trickling stream that runs through the campus as the sun slowly set, it was bliss. The only downside I guess is that I had to stop early as it got quite cold and I had to go to archery, but still it was very nice.

Rig Building

So its a couple of weeks old, but this is the time lapse video from the Rig Building day I recently did as part of a team for our experience project. The brief of the project, given to us by our first outside clients the charity Building Trust International, is to create accommodation for 8 migrant workers living in Singapore in a 20m2 and 4m high area. as part of answering this brief we built a full size model of one of the components for the design. This was to check the dimensions and possibility of someone sleeping in this component, or 'pod'. Below is a time lapse video I took through out the day showing both the construction and dismantling of the rig.

From the rig, we found that our dimensions were good, if anything too generous so this allowed us to slightly change our design for the better use of the available space. Here are also some pictures taken during the process.

 

Stealth Sci-Fi Fighter

This is a Hi Tech Sci-Fi sort of Stealth Fighter Plane Ship thingy. It was done through following one of the tutorials from Doug Chiang's Book Mechanika which I have touched upon before. 

 The first and largest obstacle I had with this was getting the initial design right. As with all this sort of work, if the design is no good, then no amount of rendering or presentation will turn it into a good design so getting that right was key. The sketches above are a testament to that with what I thought were not quite good enough designs. Another aspect I had a problem with was getting the perspective right with the wings and multiple layers.

Eventually I settled on this sketch because, although I knew the perspective was slightly off at the front, I knew I could edit it in photoshop, which I did in the image to the left.

Once In photoshop I replaced the sketch with black lines to complete the design and create a clean and easy to work with outline. I then used red lines to identify the areas that would be in shadow.

Using the fill bucket I added in the preliminary shadows. I then used gradients to add the lighting effects to the rest of the ship.

Next the original lines were duplicated and inverted adding detail to the darkest sections. Then I used an overlay layer to add the colour.

Finally I added some more highlights and shadows with the gradient and brush tools, before creating a shadow and backdrop to ground the design and a mechanic/pilot for scale.

Outdoor Sketch

Today was a really nice day, so I decided to spend some time just sitting outside, doing a bit of reading (By Design, Ralph Caplan- very good design read) and doing this sketch. A nice ending to a quite intense week.

Model Workshop 4

This is the completed Mouse Model, fully assembled. Its made by hand(mostly) out of Polyurethane(mostly) and is spray painted(mostly). I am pleased at how it has come out and I am really looking forward to making my own designs out of it next year.

Below are some different views of the model