Joshua Gardener's Art Blog

The sketchbook assignment this time was to design a sort of golem or beast which has cracks revealing lava within, a pretty cool assignment overall and keying in with the lesson assignment of how to do lava well, plus its nice to do something a little bit magical or fantasy themed after a few weeks for homework. And here is the moodboard i got together, love all the interesting shapes that people use in the designs (and indeed the rocks themselves) i looked for things that were rock or lava based creatures as well as things that used rock like textures or appearances (diablo from diablo and deathwing from warcraft for example) alot of these have similar design trends to the big, bulky and more masculine shapes, so i had the though to maybe try and play around with some slight alteration to this (and to do some completely traditional stuff- hehe) This is a pretty traditional design for this type of creature (it was also done as experimenting for designs for a boss in ...

A continuation of last weeks work, this time focusing on the legs and arms of the dinosaur; starting with the legs it seems we're returning to the more slow paced and difficult to perfect areas like the head was, perhaps my inexperience of lack of good judgement with the tools is slowing me down but this requires a slow and deliberate amount of adjustment; i was adjusting things both from the reference and what didn't "feel right" in the model, like where it lacked the bulk that you would think of for a limb. the joints were particularly pesky due to how it required deletion of faces and then pulling out edges from that deficit to create the shoulder or thigh of the limb. I would say the main joint parts or points of articulation take the most time to construct due to the range of expression or shape you have to capture there, as evidence by how as i went from the thigh to just the leg itself, the model went more smoothly (though more adjustment than the ...

Today's lesson covers the technique mixing 3D models and Photoshop painting; by using a 3D model as a base (greyscale and lighting included), we can paint over it to produce quick and high quality paintings. This is something i had sort of had thoughts about in my own head where i wanted to draw something and i knew i'd more likely be able to make the general shape in Maya due to its tool set, so i can definitely see where this comes in handy due to how it compensates with how time consuming certain shapes are to draw correctly or competently. the first task we had to handle then was immediately to apply a texture to a render in Photoshop; The tricky part here is making use of the transformation tools like; warp, skew rotate and so forth to make the textures look like they are on the renders contours. pretty nice looking eh? even at my level you can make stuff look nice by just tinkering around with it for a while. the sides i could probably work on again sin...

The dinosaurs are loose again, kinda a weird coincidence that we're covering them again huh?. regardless this isn't in my control and two i really like dinosaurs so this is great (again post commentary since busy lessons don't allow for swapping back and forth to write stuff, only the screenshots were current) the lesson plan was to make a model using an organic reference, ergo; a dinosaur based on a given project with a reference image we were meant to structure according to, the interesting part here is we were told only to use our extrude tool and the insert edge loop tool, as this is to be a simplistic model but still clear in what it represents. (all our steps were covered in instructions, but this challenge came from how well we could replicate and make it look alike with our own skills) so we started with a cube... scaled and positioned it, then extruded the faces and made a crude head shape this lead to the longer jaws and slight head shape...

(Most of this text is post lesson since we didn't have alot of downtime so i was concentrating on the lesson) Today's digital drawing is lava and boy is this a hard screen to look at with glaring red's, orange's and yellows; thought i suppose that is what makes lava so effective in telling us that it will melt our faces off if we touch it. the technique i suppose you can call it to create lava is surprisingly simple but obviously takes some finesse to get right, it's all about establishing layers and working so brighter colours are more towards the center while the more low energy colours hand on the outskirts. the first example here shows the result of me playing around with this knowledge and man is this better than anything i'd done previously. an alternative method we used made use of the layer styles, using inner and outer glows to make a sort of auto lava, so anything drawn on that layer would come out looking rather lava like. The last ...

Okay so this one was really a meh week, i slept so poorly that i can actually see for once how this screws my drawing up, speaking of late im also posting this at 5 am so i'm going to feel really dumb later on. The thing is that they aren't bad per say (thats really debatable) just uninspired, the initial sketches were fine and i made sure to get more than just the face and torso like i always focus on so that was a plus, but when it came to experimenting with mediums (compressed charcoal, pen, graphite i think) it just didn't end up being that amazing, cause i wasn't using the medium to it's fullest. The compressed charcoal had potential in the higher degree of depths of tons, but i had trouble being heavy handed during the sketch so its hard to distinguish any tones, the best one to come out of this was the pen one and that's because i made use of scumbling to make it slightly more interesting. New goal - more sleep, except not the current week be...

Probably the shortest life drawing post as this was only fairly consistent as far as technique and medium, just a split between opening sketches in charcoal and then follow up sketches using pencil, i don't really know what to say for this session because the pencil lacked impact from last week, though i can say that i'm happier with how i captured the poses (the poses this week were also really good) but i think i can't work as well with pencil for these sessions as opposed to in a sketchbook.

 More life drawing that maybe i should have posted earlier (at least i'm still in order) this time for the week of the 15th, the initial sketches went fine, but i felt i didn't get quite a move on fast enough so there wasn't alot done in the end, probably need to kick myself up the arse more to cover more. Got a chance to do pencil sketches as well but they just ended up feeling .... underwhelming, i think it's because I've gotten adjusted to the use of charcoal and the lightness of the pencil (cause i have trouble making dense marks when sketching at this size) it lacks the impact of the charcoal, perhaps this is only suitable as a base layer of a painting of sketch or at least a longer drawing to show more work (as i appear to have a very clean pencil use) Probably the highlight of the session, i worked with ... i think charcoal (maybe some graphite) but i worked by doing all of the tones and shading in the body as hard shapes; which is sort of rem...

This was the first week back and the first week of the new year so naturally things were a little... rusty at this point, so the initial sketches of the day were very much me trying to adjust back into the use of charcoal again. When it came round to longer poses i started to get back into the hang of it, and tried to cover parts of the body that i usually don't get round to (started from the shoulders down as usually starting with the head only means i never get below the waist) The finale of this session was experimenting more with mark making, the former resulted in me trying to make use of cross-hatching which, well..... didn't turn out too well, the problem here being that it's hard to distinguish the features (especially returning to this after a long period of time)  More experimenting with cross hatching (this time to more success) as i managed to more tightly pack areas of density and convey the different key lines through use of varied sizing ...