Week 16

This week I was able to finish the rest of the character concept I'm going to be modelling, starting with my value studies. I've tried to take a more streamlined approach with this concept art and just throw out a few ideas that I feel are strong, rather then just handfuls of ideas that mostly go to waste, so I reverted back to my mood boards and searched for navy/ fisherman/ sailor outfits and tried to understand what values separated their clothing and incorporated those into my design. I love the idea of 5 or 4 but it was breaking the rules of my starting point and not to over complicate it and almost keep my character in the background, so I mixed both one and two together.

As always I found the colour studies quite difficult, it really pushes me out of my comfort zone, and I feel my initial colour studies had colours randomly thrown down just for the sake of having colour, which I guess is ok for brainstorming, but it just felt like they didn't have a purpose, the only one that I feel made a slight bit of sense was number 5 as I tried to base him on a classic British red coat design, but it felt a little to flashy for me, ultimately I decided on number 2 but felt it was too saturated, so I tried to wash him out a bit in the iterations.

This is where I took a step back and just observed what I had made, I was almost scared to have greys and basic values as I felt my character needed to have colour, but that didn't fit my character, especially for the time period, as he was poor he would be wearing dull clothing. so I first attached a story element, He could have a blue jumper to separate the greys because that would be a standard issue uniform handed out to the fisherman, and the rest was a dull values surrounding it, I wanted this to signify that every aspect of his humble life is orientated around the sea in which he hates.

from this I felt I had enough information to try and tackle a final concept. overall I'm pleased with the final result, especially comparing this to my first attempt at a final character I can see that I'm improving which has given me a major confidence boost, and all I want to do now is better my art. As I'm not confident with ability to replicate the human form accurately I kind of cheated and tried to cover up has much as possible with clothing, only the hands and face are exposed. I tried use as few colours as possible to not busy up the character and used the beige colour to bring all the different ones together. I do feel that the glasses seem a bit pointless, and are only there for the sake of accessory, they make him seem too sophisticated, so I may need to think about that when tackling my sculpt.

most of my time has been taking up with my final character concept and facial studies, mainly that of the nose and lips, so I haven't been able to get a chance to start my sculpt but I have been watching tutorials to prepare myself, and trying to work the interface and navigation which is quite jarring as I'm so use to 3ds max.