Week summary - 1

Project: Design an insect

#1

A very interesting first week with lots of new stuff to think about and try out. The main new technique we looked at was silhouetting, something I'd heard mentioned often but had never tried myself. Above is my first attempt; the only design I felt had any potential was the second from the left on the bottom row, and I realised this was because I have a lot more experience drawing humanoid characters than I do insects. Also, rather than focusing on making an interesting silhouette, I was just trying to draw bugs in block colour.

Photo referenced

After realising my mistakes I went to draw some insects from photo references, to get myself familiar with their general shapes. I then found it much easier to make convincing silhouettes without getting caught up in the fact that they didn't look like insects. 

#2

#3

#4

After a few more iterations and some experimentation in Alchemy I had some designs I felt I could use shapes from. Along the way I had been thinking about what sort of creature I wanted to produce and had settled on some kind of mount/pack animal that humans might use when crossing long distances, like a camel or donkey, on another planet where a higher oxygen concentration has allowed insects to grow larger, as it was on earth thousands of years ago. I liked the bipedal stance the best for this kind of beast, but I could see it being predatory in nature prior to being domesticated by humans, so I tried to keep aspects from some of the more aggressive designs as well. 

#5

Paintover #1

I saw the wings as being fairly vestigial, but still helpful in terms of helping it pick up speed or jumping larger distances (similar to how chickens' wings function). The four limbs on the upper part of the body would be for catching and holding prey before killing it with venom from the spikes on the sides of the face, similar to how spiders eat their food by turning its insides to soup and drinking their meal.

I want to go through a few more iterations to work out the finer details of the design, but for the most part I think this one is effective and distinctive. I'm looking forward to putting it in context and showing off how I think it would function.

We also looked at ZBrush as a tool for concept art. Having only used Blender and Maya in the past it was a new experience for me and one I found quite strange and difficult, but the idea of working out concepts in 3D is an interesting one and I'd like to try building some of my ideas in ZBrush as well as drawing them out in Photoshop.