For the third set of toolkits, I chose Digital Drawing; it was advertised to us as a way to learn and refine our knowledge on general skills that apply to drawing as a whole, not just animation. And since I’m very much into illustrating, it seemed like a good pick.
This first week, we went over composition; things like the rule of thirds, leading lines, contrast and lighting. All things I generally knew about, but admittedly don’t use in my own work all that much, so this was a good refresher.
Our homework was making 6 greyscale thumbnails using the skills taught in the class, with a focus on “scale”. That’s something I’ve tried (and often failed) to do in my personal projects, so this was a very welcome challenge.
I tried doing something relatively different for each of them: for the first, I made a wide shot of a gulf, surrounded by mountains, with a giant skeleton sitting at its mouth. It was an idea I had for an old personal project I never ended up finishing, so this was very exciting to do.
I’m very happy with how it came out, especially with it being the first one; the lack of colours gives it a much more surreal feeling, and the shadow casting over the water was a last-minute addition I think really adds to the eeriness of it. The mountains leading the eye to the skeleton both with their colours and positioning works fairly well, and help convey the skeleton’s incredible size.
For my second thumbnail, I tried creating a shot based on Spider-Man, a character I’m very fond of: dynamic shots and character poses are essential when drawing the character, so I love using him as an exercise to push my skills, and this was no exception. It took a few tries to decide how to configure the buildings, but eventually managed to have a shot with the buildings pointing at Spider-Man high up in the air, his black silhouette contrasting with the white sky.
I decided to scrap the civilians to keep the attention on Spider-Man, as well as to further push how high up he is. Making it all lineless was a challenge, especially as I hadn’t planned it from the beginning, but I think the final image makes it work very well. The end product reminds me a bit of the concept art for The Incredibles, which was all made in a 1950s graphic style.
After seeing how long it took to draw these two, I decided to draw the rest of the images on my phone, as it’s faster than using Harmony on my computer (which, for some reason, can be annoyingly slow).
My third thumbnail went back to the idea of a larger person, but this time in a different tone and setting; a mysterious giant sitting in a forest, looking at a human staring up at him.
Making the shading on the floor and the giant’s skin was a challenge, and it looked a bit weird after exporting it, but I think the end product looks fine. Adding some flying birds to show the giant’s size was a good last-minute addition.
I wanted the fourth thumbnail to have a more classic fantasy trope, so i drew a knight entering a huge castle door, with the shadows and lines all leading to his body, contrasting against the background.
It was very rough at first, but a bit of cleaning up made it look nice enough. There’s definitely still some clean-up to be done, however.
The fifth thumbnail went for a more abstract fantasy setting; a castle high up in the sky, on top of a bottomless pit surrounded by jagged spikes, all pointing up to it. A very random assortment of dangers, that I think work to give the scene a sense of threat.
Making the sun have some waves in the clean-up helps with the atmosphere, and having the spikes contrast against the floor makes them seem almost like a beast’s teeth, upping the creepiness.
Finally, I decided to end on something simple; a deep hole in the ground, with a mysterious beast at its end, shrouded in darkness.
The shading helps direct the eyes towards the beast, and not showing its body allows for more tension. I’m not too happy with how the human’s shadow came out, so I might retry this concept later down the line to improve on it.
Overall, this exercise was very fun: having to think of creative and varied shots was challenging but exciting, and getting them done (and having some even look good) was very rewarding. I think the first three are much better than the last three, so I know I have much to improve on, but it doesn’t change the fact this was a fun learning experience.