The fourth day of life drawing

This lesson we were told to bring colours, only half of us didn't as we didn't know we needed to bring colours so we had to use coloured chalk instead, yay(!)
Although really this lesson was a bit of a joke, I mean come on it was halloween and Gordon put on Steph's horse mask. If thats not a not lesson then I don't really know what is and I've had my fair share of not serious lessons. Anyway here are the drawings and yes, I did spend a lot of time on the horse mask. Because its funny to see a naked guy coming at you with an Assassins Creed hidden blade drawn and wearing a horse mask, thats why.

Oh yea me Callum and Steph had a bit of a chalk fight....it was a long lesson

Character clothing and environment/prop mood boards

Ok not the character clothing as it decided to upload upside down  >:(

The full character history of Jennifer Grey

Jennifer Grey

Female

Caucasian

27 years old

Current position: Wing man to Aden Taylor aboard Lawson class carrier N.S.C. Lydia.

Born in New Manchester, Republic of England, Earth on the 4 May 2104 Jennifer was born into a prominently military family. With 3 older brothers (2,3 and 5 years older) and a Commander rank father along with various Aunties, Uncles, Cousins Grandfathers and Grandmothers all serving in the Earth Space Command (ESC) from marines to officers to mechanics and pilots the military has always been in Jennifer's life, along with 3 brothers. Jennifer always had to fight for her toys, her food, her space and once her birthday presents. As her father was military swift punishment always followed, however during the times when he was stationed away from home discipline quickly relaxed and the fights started again although it was never malicious and nothing more than simple play fighting.

This turned her into (unsurprisingly) a fighter and while this never really manifested through primary school where she formed friendships with mostly boys during high school her brothers play fighting put her in good stead. During the first month of high school Jennifer met Alice. From a similar military background, hers being the medical core, the two hit it off very well. Over time Jennifer met more girls and by the end of the second year she had several good friends, some girls some boys. In her third year Jennifer got her first boyfriend, whom she broke the nose of when she found him to be cheating, humiliating him in front of half the year group. However at the end of the third year Jennifer picked a fight with the wrong group of girls. While standing up for Alice, Jennifer insulted a girl two years above her by the name of Erin. After school Erin and several of her friends cornered Jennifer and beat her enough to send a message. Hurt but not broken Jennifer returned to school the next day showing the defiance that had been distilled into her and her brothers by their father. While Erin and her group never bothered Jennifer again Jennifer learnt that sometimes it's not always a good idea to fight and that she should show some restraint in certain situations.

While Jennifer was always inclined to join the ESC and follow in her fathers and brothers footsteps, much to the disappointment and worry of her mother, she was finally convinced during a workshop in her school by the ESC. Being swept up in the romanticism of the air force branch she joined up with the space cadets, a modification of the now almost defunct air cadets. Her military background had already given her a head start and she quickly progressed through the ranks. Her greatest love though were the machines. When she was not flying in them she was looking at them, how they worked, how to improve, she would spend hours looking at them and reading the manuals. Noticing this a mechanic by the name of Steve took Jennifer under his wing and showed her the ins and outs of the ships, how to use the tools and basically become a mechanic.

Upon enlisting in the ESC air force Jennifer quickly found the mechanics bay and stayed there, coming out only for exercises, lectures and the occasional night out where she discovered a talent for drinking nearly everyone under the table. All but one, Aden Taylor, who beat her by one drink. Something he has never let her live down. After that the two got to talking over water and aspirin and over the years of flight school formed a close friendship the stood them in good stead when it came to choosing wing men. Due to the way they 'danced' through the air in perfect synchronisation the two were never beaten and were often called 'The Dancers,' much to the annoyance of Aden who thought it too 'girly,' Jennifer on the other hand liked it as she was never really got the chance to be feminine what with having 3 brothers, however when Aden stole some cans of pink paint and sprayed her helmet pink and wrote 'pretty princess' down the side of her fighter she put him in the infirmary for nearly a week with a dislocated shoulder and a cracked rib.

Despite their occasional fights the two requested that they be stationed together. Their first posting aboard the N.S.C Coyote saw Aden meet Jennifer's oldest brother James who was part of the marine contingency assigned to the small frigate. Their second posting aboard the carrier N.S.C. Lydia saw Aden and Jennifer refine their techniques. Thanks to Jennifer's now prominent mechanics skills her fighter boasts better stats than the other factory spec ones and she is almost always found tinkering in the hangar bay trying to improve it in every way possible. This has not left her much time for a social life aboard the ship and her only friends outside of the hangar bay are Aden, George (although she more tolerates him than likes him) and Mark. While she has tried dating nothing has ever really amounted to anything and she decided that she would focus on her flying and her fixing, if love comes along then so be it. Currently she is outfitting her fighter for escort missions to escort cargo shuttles down to the surface of CY-003, ready to be colonised.

Jennifer has brown hair in a bob cut and dark brown eyes. She has a slightly pointed chin and a longish face with average sized lips and eyebrows with minimal make-up (foundation and a little lipstick on occasion). Her body is athletic as would be expected from military training and she has a few small scars on her back and stomach from play fights that ended roughly. She often wears a medium green jumpsuit with various oil stains, some new some old however in her downtime she likes to wear light blue jeans, a black leather jacket, a faded green tank top and black plimsolls

To sum up, Jennifer:

• Had a good childhood despite having 3 older brothers and a military family, turning her into quite a fighter
• Struggled making girl friends in primary school but did in high school
• Learnt the hard way that fighting won't solve everything
• Joined the space cadets and found her love of flying and fixing
• Can be a heavy drinker on occasion, which also makes her a little louder than normal
• Likes to be feminine but only when she wants to be, as proved when Aden painted 'pretty princess' on her fighter and sprayed her helmet pink
• Keeps in little contact with her brothers largely due to them moving about a lot
• Keeps to herself when working however she does socialise within her 'hanger bay' group
• Has been on a few dates but never anything serious, prefers to stick to her work and let love find her instead

Photo manipulation

So while I was waiting to have my work critiqued and the fact it was far to early in the morning to start 3D I decided to catch up on some photo manipulation which is the only art work I can do reliably well. Callum told me to do a moon base which I did, only because I didn't have a better idea. Here are some screenshots I took along the way.

So this the stock image, I had already taken a sponge tool to the rear mountain range to make them look grey
and I removed the cross marks by using the stamp tool

Found a cute little biodome greenhouse thing to which I added a shadow on the floor, trying to keep it inline with the
other shadows. I then coloured in the rear of the greenhouse on a different layer and took the opacity down to about 50%

Found a mars rover type thing and thought it would look cute if I added it driving over the mountain, same story with
the shadow. New layer, coloured the floor, opacity about 50%. I also found a picture of the Eden project I think and added that in the background. Had to take a chunk of the mountain range out so I could place the dome behind it but I blended it in with stamp, blur and smudge.

This is it finished. Again added the same shadow effect to the dome and found a starfield image too. Played with the lighting of it to make it look a little more realistic but looking at it now, that yellow star is a tad annoying. 

Character design: Perspective images

No idea why I'm posting these images as they are ridiculously bad. I warned you I couldn't draw. Anyway say hi to Jennifer Grey, scary isn't she. She's a character from a game idea I had in college when we were told to come up with a game idea and now I've drawn her, but no way near to the quality I would have liked. As my drawing is pretty shoddy and my life drawing is even worse what I decided to do with this was create almost a hand drawn collage. I found a picture of Ada Wong from Resident Evil 4 and used the overall body shape and rough haircut. The face shape was actually my own drawing and happened completely by accident. As did the arms which turned out slightly better than I feared. The hand on hip is from a model and the wrench hand is from a picture of a wrench. The boots were another random picture as were the sneakers in the off duty picture. The clothes we drawn pretty much without reference however the jacket collar was taken from one of my moodboard pictures. The facial features turned out pretty poorly and they were drawn from a 'how to draw' book, still could have been much worse.
The skin tone however......well I've seen feral ghouls from Fallout 3 who have a better skin colour and complexion than these pictures. I bought skin tone pencils thinking  I might be able to learn how to use them and that they might improve the look of my character. Looking back I really should have looked at tutorials first before I bought them. Overall I personally think these pictures are below average and really don't convey very well what I want her to look like. The fault of me lacking much drawing talent :S. I'm going to need a lot of tutorials...

I will get this rotation sorted out at some point I swear. This is pre skin colour, which doesn't look
too bad in my opinion

And this is post skin colour, which looks pretty terrible, also I think I drew the hip hand too small...far too small

The third day of life drawing

This day was all about scale, using vanishing points to draw buildings and people in scale. We also found out on Wednesday that you can use as many as 6 vanishing points, or was it 5? Anyway it was a lot and it gets progressively more difficult just to keep track of what's going on the more vanishing points you have. This lesson though we used one or two vanishing points. We started drawing a building which I didn't get finished, not even close to,  so we could draw a sitting Gordon in front. I think the idea was that we would draw a street with a 'road' down the middle, draw Gordon in the middle then draw him again in a different pose but scaled down. As I thought this wasn't explained well I ended up just drawing a building corner before I realised it wouldn't work, then got confused and started again. When it came to drawing Gordon I got some of the pose done before he switched. However I couldn't for the life of me scale him down, especially now he was in a different pose so I did the best I could, which wasn't very good at all. Instead, to show I at least understood the concept, I was told to draw a cube, then scale it down which I did very well. Even got around to putting a little shading on it. Gordon then started to do motion poses, I think thats what they're called, where he perform an action like swinging a sword but pose at intervals so we had like a flip book just on one page. Learning from the 5 minute poses I didn't even attempt to draw Gordon in the poses instead I drew stick men which came out quite well. Bit scary when he has two daggers above his head looking like he's about to drive them into you and your mates skulls, tad off putting I found. Still I started adding a body to the stick men but didn't get far due to time constraints. We finished up with another lesson on scale. Gordon sat on a chair, arm on a table with a camera pointing at his hand, which was gripping the edge. This image was projected onto the wall behind and again we were told to draw everything we saw. I got the table, the projected image and some very creepy looking fingers. Given more time I might have made it able to look acceptable but honestly this was a tricky one. Drawing is not my strong point, hands even less so so this was a nightmare for me. Which is why I never got far.

This was the building I started to draw until I realised that
I probably got the wrong idea about what I was supposed
to be doing

Again, sorry for the rotation issue. No matter what I
did I just couldn't get the two Gordon's to scale. Personally
I thought it would be impossible as they are two completely
different images 

The scale drawing I was told to do just so I
could prove I understood the concept

The fighting stick figures I thought worked quite well,
I can always add body mass to them as I have the basic
pose outlined.

I honestly have no idea why I didn't get much done for
this drawing. I think the fingers must have bugged me
because they didn't look right , I tried drawing the head
but it was out of scale with the fingers
which would have annoyed me even more.

The second day of life drawing

We were told to try new mediums in this lesson and told to bring chalk or charcoal. Now I found the hard way charcoal is an expensive medium to use only once so I still have 11 1/2 strips of it left in the box out of a box of 12. This lesson was about deforming Gordon's body but still keeping it in proportion, like long legs, little head but average sized body. We were told to draw 8 lines on A3 paper, I think, each representing the distance between different sections of the body. Some people gave him tiny legs, big head, big body. I however made him look like something from Resident Evil....it still haunts me. I don't think I got the hang of the proportions and I definitely didn't get the hang of charcoal, its messy, inaccurate and personally I don't think it looks very nice. So I will try to focus on pencils and shader pencils, plus I prefer the art style they deliver. Afterwards we tried our hand at shading. Gordon was sat in front of a projector and we were told to draw him, his shadow and any people sitting in front of us. As I couldn't see Gordon I decided to focus on his shadow being projected on the wall and rather stupidly used charcoal to 'color' his shadow in. That was a bad idea, not only did it not look good at all but it also wreaked any piece of paper it came into contact with. Also I tried to upload it but for some reason Blogger wants to upload it upside down and I don't know how to change it.
All I can say is tried charcoal and didn't like it very much. The more you know.

This was my first attempt at using charcoal.
I'm not sure if this was a 5 minute pose, I
don't believe it was, still it didn't go well.

This is 'Slenderman's big brother' as people
decided to call it. As you can see the
proportions didn't work out well at all and in
the end I decided to actually make it look like
something from Resident Evil, hopefully not to offend
Gordon..too much.

First day of life drawing (also my first ever blog)

Having never done life drawing before I wasn't really sure what to expect, obviously a naked person standing in the middle of a room surrounded by 'artists' but I honestly believed that the guy was going to stand there for the whole lesson and we would just draw him in a pose.  5 minute drawings however I was not ready for I'm a slow drawer so 5 minutes is not enough time to get anything down at all. Yes I know it's supposed to loosen you up and you're not supposed put detail in largely because you don't have the time but still the amount of 5 minute drawings just annoyed me. That being said the half hour pose was ok, I got a reasonable amount done and it does at least look like a person, sitting on....something. By person I mean a Shrek type character. Long story short, I don't think I'm a fan of life drawing, no matter how useful it may be in the long run.

An example of what I can get done in 5 minutes

I accidently got charcoal on this one from another picture but
this is another 5 minute pose, got slightly more done this time

I don't know how to rotate the image to landscape so sorry.
This is the half hour pose which I'm actually pleased with
to a certain degree, more time would have been nice though