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.

New Year Resolution Wallpaper

Yes I know it's a bit late for a proper new years resolutions, but for this I was so inspired by the the work featured here, that I had to emulate their work and make a new year resolution wallpaper of my own, for my laptop rather than the iPads they choose.

I decided to copy the almost art nouveu/deco style of most of the designs, using this cursive script, and the plain textured (oxymoron there) background. The resolution is my own, as is more some basic goals to live life to the full and all that jazz. The text is centred as this allows me to see all the text when it is up on my desktop, where I will leave it for the year, or until I get bored.

Finally I would just like to emphasise having a look at the other resolutions done, especially for designers and anyone interested in graphics, here's the link again: http://www.toresolveproject.com/. Thanks

Cocktail Maker- Finished

Finally it is done. At last I have completed the artifact part of the Graphics course. My Cocktail Maker is complete, minus a name, and a tagline, and a poster, and a workbook.......so mostly done......ish.

But anyway this is what I have done, and I am very pleased with it. It has taken a long time and it was very difficult to get it to look real, I still don't think it does, but oh well. Below are the main stages that went into the creation of this image.

After a very rough sketch I drew the Isometric (35 degrees) drawing on the left to finalise the design, followed by the more dramatic and eye catching two point perspective drawing on the right.

 

 That drawing was then scanned and imported into Photoshop where using the pen tool I isolated and created masks for all the different shapes, which took quite a while (100+ screenshots!!)

Then with the masks completed I was able to start importing other images and textures into the image, shaping them with the masks and transform tools and adding highlights and shading. Of course this took the most time requiring 200+ screenshots.

But anyway with that out of the way I can now get on with the poster and the workbook. With that in mind my late night reading today will be: The Visual Quickstart Guide to Illustrator CS5....all of it; better get going.

Happy New Year 2012

Well it's been a bit of an odd year.

Looking back on 2011 I can honestly say I've never had a year quite so....mixed. With my illness and hospital at the start of the year and my A-Levels, the start wasn't too great. Then came a nice recovery period over the summer with a great camp to Denmark (despite being limited by doctors orders). And then finally a great autumn and winter at University. So yeah it has definitely improved over the year (despite a low at about Easter when I couldn't eat anything) and thanks to everyone who has help me through it and enjoy it. And also thanks to all of you who have (and are) looking at this, my blog (and if your wondering the image above was made of a combination of Photoshop and Illustrator). Your continual interest has really helped me get through some hard times and you have really pushed and expanded my work and work load, so again thank you.
So now nothing more than to hope you all had a good 2011 and I hope you have an even better 2012 (unless the world ends......or not).

Happy New Year!

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas! Yeah OK I know it is late but the days up to Christmas were filled with shops, wrapping and sellotape, and sorry but I'm not going to be doing this on Christmas Day and yesterday I was out so today then. I wanted to do a wintry scene so I settled on this view over some snowy mountains with the stag (or reindeer if you want) standing on this outcrop. It was fun, I got to use some different and more unusual brushes in photoshop, and it was interesting doing the deer. Oh and I may have been somewhat inspired by The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, which I got on Christmas and I must say is brilliant!

 These below show different stages of the painting, which are also the total number of layers I used for this, the last layer being the deer.

So hope you all had a merry Christmas, and hopefully I will get another post before new years so so-long for now.

Cocktail Maker- Mixing Sketching and Photoshop

A couple more concepts for Graphics, to help flesh out the workbook. These are two designs where I show a couple of the quick ways I can render concepts. I started both designs with a simple pencil and pen isometric drawing.

Then I added marker rendering to the sketch adding tone and texture to help define both its colour form and material.

Then finally I used the original drawing in Photoshop to create this colour render of the the product.

The second design was done in exactly the same way as the one above. To quicken the Photoshop stage I used my graphics tablet as I am quicker and more comfortable with it than with either the mouse of touchpad.

A World of Drink

Here is another graphic I have made for my graphics project. I am designing a cocktail maker, and as a part of the research I have been looking up the origins of various drinks and cocktails. During which I came to the interesting realisation that alcoholic drinks are one of the few discoveries/inventions that have been created worldwide by independent cultures. As such I decided to make this graphic to help demonstrate this fact.

I started off with some various items related to making cocktails, getting images of them and creating silhouettes of them. The images I used are below.

I then imported them into an image of a map of the world to create the image below.

However I did not like how it came out it appeared too cluttered and a mix to too many varied shapes. As such I decided to remake it using only the images below.

From these I made this image which I will use in my workbook. I will annotate it in illustrator, as it is a better text editor.