Joshua Gardener's Art Blog

Regardless of delays, following the previous Halloween theme, the current theme for the duration of 2 weeks is insectoids, in which we have to research various types of bugs and produce creature of our own design based on that research, this needing to be more than just a bug with a human head or visa versa, since the duration for this is longer it also needs to include the final piece with a front view side view sheet, as well as a 3/4 view to match how the industry handles the design of characters. To start us of as always a moodboard needs to be made first to start the idea process; My moodboard ended up being very simplistic as when i started pulling image i got very strong ideas for my insectoids from the outset. but the images ive grabbed here cover some beetles, mantis, centipede, moths and bees, wasps and hornet types. this came from a mixture of personal interest towards the insect as well as ones that i enjoyed elements of.  The first sketches i did we...

For todays session we have an ongoing modeling challenge for constructing a building based on a jpeg image given to us, this being to see how much we have learned in terms of constructing objects and applying mapping to that object. The first obvious step seems to be to break down the shapes into identifiable components like cubes and cylinders, following robins advice to help measure distance using the pillars in the structure, i first constructed a pillar to use throughout the model. after measuring them out to try and find the distance that most resembles the image i counted a rough distance of 17 units between the pillars, and then spaced out 9 pillars to match one of the walls of the image. Next is the skirting board sort of thing around the bottom of the building, which was a nightmare to do considering its smaller but more complex scale of detail, replicating this was a little annoying, but then allowed me to apply it by my pillars. (also i turned on wirefra...

This should hopefully be the last catch up batch of life drawing scans, from the week being posted now and the next weeks should be up tommorow, then i should be on schedule for posting up to date (for my life drawing at least) The initial part of the session covered some more charcoal sketches with a new person to draw, this also ended up with us doing some exaggerated poses for our second sheet which was a bit hard to grasp for me because it didnt fall into just observing or drawing from my imagination. The second half had us working with inks and that was definitely pushing the boundries of how comfortable i am with my art, i often dislike art styles which dont let me have a great deal of control (or at least at my current skill level means i cannot control ink that well)  the first two i did i was not happy with at all, i seem to have trouble hitting the mid tones of ink, either going very dark or light with my tones and no mid ground, eventually in the last p...

For today's lesson we have started the animation of the turret that we've been working on for a few weeks worth of lessons; First we started the rigging process, which basically comes down to grouping objects in the model together so that they correspond with each other, which makes animating an easier process because if you wanted to move the turret to turn and fire on something, it would allow the guns to follow that translation and save a lot of fine tuning and moving to get elements to move in tandem. Now we're working on locking translatable elements during animation so it can only animate in certain ways, this is effective for cutting down excessive inputs and making sure any unexpected elements don't occur while animating. Now we're moving on with the actual animation of our turrets, using the timeline at the bottom of the screen and editing the rotation or translation of our objects and setting them as keyframes to show animation for ...