Visual Design Progression

So I wanted to do an update on how my drawings and things have been going. But first I guess I should show you some of the drawings I did before coming to De Montfort.

Sorry for the bad quality but I've never had an A3 scanner to use to upload these with. So well drawing has always been one of my strenghs yet I have never drawn landscapes at all up until now. As you can see I just concentrated on people animals and things. Then I got my first chance with perspective and landscapes with the Cannal project.

Things didn't start too well, I understood the vanishing point and horizon line and I think I've pretty much got 1 point perspective down but my final piece was quite disapointing. I had never drawn trees so I drew the basic shapes and shading and hoped for the best, as I really had no idea how to draw trees. Then I picked an angle where the vanishing point was hidden behind the bridge so it lost some sense of depth. I'm also still rellying heavily on HB pencils at this time as it was what I was told to use before this. Then came to the archway project.

So continuing with 1 point perspective but being unable to see the vanishing point. I didn't find this too difficult I preety much had it down on my first attempt only making a few errors here and there. I'm slightly happier with my final piece for this one as the trees although still fluffy at this stage at least have branches in areas. I'm still using HB pencils though so my shading is still lacking because of it. S the next Challange was 2 point perspective which really tripped me up.

I found this project very difficult it took me a long time before I got my head around it. Luckily I had a talk with Chris about how I was doing and he pointed out that I should start using graphite sticks and 6B and B pencils. So thats what I did though in most of my sketches I havn't attempted any shading as I was just trying to work out 2 point. I spent the whole of that sunday just drawing out the outline of my Final piece, whos building I regeret picking as its such a complex building, I'm sure I must have been a little crazy to pick it. It was around 3 weeks later that I actually got it finished working on it whenever I got time but I'm really happy with it now as the time I have spent on it seems to have paid off. I got to practice with shading, and look trees that actually look like trees! I watched a video tutorial online to how to draw them and thats helped me quite a lot. We then went on to work more on rendering techniques and I got to test out B pencils alot more.

This was a very enjoyable project, I got to experiment quite a bit and test how much more effective 5B shading techniques are. In my sketches you can see my experimentation the most, with the skulls being done with graphite sticks and B pencils whilst some of the lighter bone structures done with B and HB pencils. My final piece was a mixture of both, as the bones where light and contrast was difficult to find I wanted it to retain its smooth feel so I was slightly unwilling to rely too heavily on 6B pencils as the texture they can give sometimes I thought might have spoilt it. Unfortunately the result is that its still quite flat.
I'm making progress and learning perspective skills that I had never been taught before and my rendering is improving. I'll write another blog to show you how I continue to use these skills.