Final 2D assignment

During the past couple of weeks I’ve been working on the two final assignments of the 2D course. They were optional and available to do if you wanted a higher grade at the end of the course.

The first assignment was to take this rough sketch and make it solid.

Here’s the first step I made, constructing the body with simple shapes like cylinders and circles:

The hips are a box to help show which way they’re tilted. The next step was to make the body look more, well, like a body:

Then I gave him some clothes and a face, as well as his gun:

And finally, the clean lines:

The other assignment we had was to take a clean line drawing of a city given to us by the teachers, determine a light source and shade it accordingly. This is the image we were given:

I decided that it was going to be a sunny day and that the light source came from the upper left corner. I began by dividing the city into different parts depending on how far away they are from the observer. The further away they are, the lighter they will be. This is called atmospheric perspective.

Here’s the light source:

After this I began adding highlights on all surfaces that are turned towards the sun. I used the same light color on all the parts of the city, which meant the ones closer to the observer will have more contrast.

Then I added even more highlights on the surfaces that also are turned towards the sun, but not as much as the previous ones.

Finally, I added more shadows and highlights to the parts closest to the observer. This is to give more detail and contrast to those parts, since they are closest.

And that’s it!

Holiday assignment pt. 2

Here’s the finished drawing!

I’m quite pleased with it overall, shading drawings is one of the things I usually have the most difficulty with. My biggest concern is that the stairs don’t look like they’re connected to the wall, instead it looks like they’re just sort of ”floating”. The clouds in the background looks kind of flat too, but maybe I’m just being overly self-critical!

Holiday assignment

I’ve been really bad at updating this blog lately, apologies!

Now that Christmas is out of the way I’ve started working on our holiday assignment for real. Our assignment was to draw the character we designed earlier during the course, princess Bella in my case, in an environment with correct perspective and to shade it.

The first thing I did was to draw a few thumbnails with ideas for the layout of the drawing.

I had some different ideas with different difficulty levels. In the end I chose the thumbnail to the right, because I felt it was nice and simple and at the same time had the difficulty level I wanted from this assignment.

The second thing I did was to draw the environment with perspective in a different document. I framed off an area in the middle which will be the area you actually see in the final drawing. The vanishing points on the horizon are far out to the left and right to not make the perspective so extreme.

Finally I drew Bella going down the stairs and added flat colors.

Originally I wanted it to be sunny outside the window and for Bella to have a relaxed, joyful expression, but I decided to make the drawing more dramatic and to make her look outside with a worried face. There will be something dark and menacing outside the window once I’m done.

That’s as far as I’ve gotten now! Now onto the actual shading!

From thumbnail to turnaround

This week’s assignment in 2D graphics was to chose one of the thumbnails we made two weeks ago and make a full character out of it! The thumbnail I chose is the one to the upper left. First we had to create a background and a personality for out character, so this is my princess Bella:

Name: Princess Bella

Gender: Female

Physical health/handicaps: Good mental and physical health, fairly strong, quick and agile for her age. No handicaps.

Personality: Very bubbly and outgoing, creative and kind.

Family: Mother and father, who are kind and queen, and a younger brother. She gets along with all of them quite well. They disagree sometimes when she wants to go out and explore the world instead of doing her duties, but at the end of the day they love each other. She often plays with her younger brother and gives him toys she’s made herself.

Intelligence: She has a creative intelligence and loves tinkering and creating things.

Hobbies: She likes tinkering and inventing stuff, she also likes studying and reading about many different subjects. When she’s not doing that or her duties as princess she likes wandering around the islands and meeting and talking to people.

Friends: She has some friends in the sense that she’s very caring and curious about everyone she meets, and she makes friends very easily. When she is out she always says hello to everyone and chats to them, and remembers things like birthdays and what people do for a living. However, she doesn’t have any close friends that she hangs out with on a regular basis.

History: Bella lives in a land of floating islands high above the lands below, and she is the princess who will one day be queen. Their lands has always been peaceful and filled with kind and creative people, while the lands below are dark and dangerous and filled with monsters. One day, a horrifying monster managed to get up to their land and spread its evil, causing people to start fighting and become sad. The only way for this to stop is for Bella to use the umbrella she invented to fly to the highest floating island and the temple within. This temple holds a powerful crystal that has been corrupted by the monster, and Bella has to use her inventions to purify the crystal and thereby fight off the monster.

Here is the first picture I did of her:

And then it was time to construct a turnaround of Bella! I’ve never done it before and it was a bit tricky. I don’t think it turned out 100% correct, but it’s good enough for now!

Character thumbnails

This week we begun our 2D graphics course, which was fun! The first couple of days we talked about anathomy and we got to do croquis with a nude model. The time we had to draw each pose ranged between 30 seconds and five minutes. I like that by flipping through the pages in my sketchbook I can see the difference between the morning of the first day and the afternoon of the last day.

Our assignment for this week was to draw 20 thumbnails of characters for one of two concepts. The first concept was called Clash of the Heavens and the other was Princess Bella and her Umbrella. I chose the latter. The game is a 2D platformer for iPad and iPhone, and I chose a simple cartoony style for my characters.

Some of them definitely, uh… turned out better than others. I was running out of inspiration towards the end. My favorites are the top left one, the lizard and the bird.

I’m really curious what the programmers have done this week. (Hint, hint.)