Joshua Gardener's Art Blog

To continue from my concepts, I took to Photoshop to refine and further experiment with UI and menu idea's, this time with something that would be usable in the game. First since there was the gear theme that we were running with, i thought the most appropriate thing would be to make gears digitally, so that then i could re purpose them for some initial designs. The principle was just to get a variety of pins to choose from so that we could vary these up in the designs. These gears led to these initial quick designs, which were not too popular with the group, (and not just for the colouring, that was mainly for identification of elements) but the use of gears wasn't desired and they wanted me to refine the gear shape (some of which i was producing concept art for) so it was back to the drawing board. New and refined gear, only one though because it also incorporates the cross theme into the design, but overall looks alot more solid than the previous design. in c...

And now for something completely different; For this session (since it's the final one) i got the chance to do sketches in my sketchbook, which makes using pencil a ton easier since it shows and handles better than when using the canvas, though the beginning sketches did make me realise that i have gotten very used to using charcoal in these sessions. Still it's not like they're bad, its just a slight conflict of wanting to draw how i usually do in these sessions, the form comes across well but some of the finer points are a little off. One minute sketches again, and these were a lot easier to handle with a sketchbook due to my proximity and ease of use for the book, though getting the form out is still quite hard within a short time. I'm miles better than when i started but it's also hard when the model is different because you become more accustomed to drawing certain shapes quickly. Some close up drawings off Face and hands both 15 minutes ...

Some what shorter week 3 post, partly because a lack of actual drawings done in lesson, and partly because pencil drawings are like vampires and resist the gaze of a camera so some drawings won't be showing their faces on this blog. Starting sketches, which frankly could be better and seem to have to taken to forming some sort of monster by fusing together, Luckily my one minute sketches went alot better, the model holding a small drape made for interesting focus points along with the posing and gave me something interesting to try and include in the sketches.  The last 2, one is an charcoal piece, which came out mediocre as i didn't cover enough in the shading area so some of the shading looks a little flat or out of place on the model (i also really didn't want to draw a face today so now the face is a void), unlike on the arm where multiple tones make the shading look more natural. I need to keep in mind the importance of not just adding marks to cover more ...

As you can guess this session of life drawing (the second week of march on a Wednesday to be exact) had perspective drawing come into effect again, much to the annoyance of me (because i suck at it still) Regardless, we begin with sketches and some 1 minutes sketches (gotta go fast eh?) i can definitely feel myself grasping some of the key lines to get down for drawing poses and the variety of the poses is definitely encouraging (it's a shame most aren't viable for a long length sketch, cause you know holding a pose is a pain) Some of the wide poses and different stances gave a real challenge in capturing their position in such as short time. Onto my favourite type of sketches, the ones where i can sit and calmly get all the detail and shading in. I definitely prefer the one on the left here, i like picking out key tension of excitement points in poses where there's alot going on, so i was sketching the arms and even got time to do some of the lower and up...

A post on time? what heresy is this? but regardless of the incredulous nature of it, the march round up is bang on time. starting with the first week of march's posts; As usual we start with warm up sketches, which lead into quick 1 minute sketches. I think i was having a slow start that day since my initial sketches are a little rough. definitely need to work on making sure i get warmed up before drawing in the day. (though at some point your work has to suffer for things to get better) The one minute sketches came out really nicely, because i was trying to resist swapping sheets and losing time, i had to cram all of the sketches in one sheet, making a rather interesting combination of poses and sizes in sketches. Getting into the meat of the poses, i have a piece done using charcoal, which suffered a bit in terms of creativity and my need to do the hair on the mode, while the other piece ended up more peculiar due to me using a unique two pronged pen whic...

So carrying on from my initial moodboarding and thoughts I decided to create a few designs to test the direction of my designs, I could show the sketches to my group and focus my designs around what they liked. To start off i wanted a little visualisation of what the screen might look like, in order to better come up with some designs that would fit appropriately onto the screen. So since our group opted (at my nudging) to do a one hit kill but no lives system the top left corner of the screen would now become a good place for a score bar (since it's usually a primary focus so things like HP and Mana bars usually get allocated here. The top right could be used for a high score bar, which would be nice if it could track the users highest score for them to compete against. It's also out of the way enough that you can look at it, but it will not be distracting to the user. and the bottom i though could maybe have a boss health bar, since we want to have boss battles in ...

Since Christmas I've been working on another term based submission for my course, much like my winter submission; With the different aspect of working with a group and having a lesser degree of freedom on the type of game we're making as to focus our efforts a bit more. The lovely people i have been working with are here; http://clangcga.blogspot.co.uk/  - Craig http://premfatek.blogspot.co.uk/ - Prem http://riprajanu.blogspot.co.uk/   - Razvan Same as before we got a brief, for the next two months (or more precisely up till 27th of March (also the release date of Bloodborne - yay)) To construct a shoot em up style game. Cleverly this meant character design wouldnt be wasted trying to design characters forever as we were working with a ship and although there is some freedom in how to approach that style of game, there is a lot more focused direction. I've gotten pretty into shoot em up's, more strangely because of the PS4, i originally had a...