Adobe Photoshop - Steampunk

The aim for this assignment was to create a steampunk character or object. I was a bit wary upon my initial ideas for this as I didn't want to end up with a generic steampunk setting but before creating a design I would be happy with I first had to practice poses and to break out of my mentality of illustration = concept art. My first set of ideas (below) were very illustration based and I felt, along with the advice of classmates, that a stronger focus on what concept art is was needed. I also included an image I had done a few weeks prior whilst trying to practice character art

It was at this point that the debate with illustration vs concept art led me to restarting my ideas. And my first approach was to study some poses from industry character concepts and draw my own.

I then took my previous ideas and ended up taking the concept of a steampunk gunner forward. A character that wouldn't be wearing the dresses and high fashion of some steampunk representations but instead look a bit more hardworn. Of course certain elements like corsets I thought would work well so I included them still. I also set myself a goal with this assignment to try my hand at the drawing of ambient occlusion (AO). However for this to work well a detailed lineart is needed. Now I haven't really done much lineart before so I had to spend longer on this stage than I first intended.

The lineart turned out okay if taking into account of my lack of experience with it. But there are many elements of this technique that I need to learn and develop more. First off my line widths were pretty much the same throughout the drawing which loses some of the focus. And the face still seems a bit off to me but I hope to be able to correct this in later stages if this still bothers me to a decant extent. Moving onto the AO I instantly had issues with the brushes and smudge tool and will have to look into creating personalized brush presets for the smudge tool. I am not happy with my time management up to this point as the lineart took longer than anticipated. But I shall continue the development of AO and will then colour from that.

The final AO result has positive elements to it and some negative to it. For starters considering it was my first time trying to recreate this kind of shading within a painting I felt I achieved some success. However it was not too a degree I am completely happy with, as I moved through the figure I learnt more and more about the creation of AO and also felt my initial drawing was in need of greater refinement. I will take these aspects into consideration in the creation of my next piece and use this knowledge to further my understanding of the form.

The colouring and rendering part of this process took many attempts to even bring to an acceptable standard as the multiple saved copies within my hard drive can stand testimony too. The final result is something I am semi happy with but feel like my lack of understanding of light held me back in some aspects. And my struggle with the Ao in the previous step left me having to manipulate it so not having a a great base to work from held me back a bit.