Tutorial: Sketching and Idea Generation

Hi all, I have created a series of free tutorials which show how I sketch and generate ideas. The series is aimed at beginners, but maybe intermediates will find it useful too. These tutorials will eventually build into a full course, but there is enough currently published, to get you started. Check out the tutorials on my YouTube channel. Hope you find it useful.

Sketching and Idea Generation

Plant Creature 03/04

Next stage was to add back 'legs' to the creature and get a little more descriptive with the surface/texture. With the back section I wanted to keep with the creepy crawly feeling so I created a set of spider type legs to support the mid section. 

The idea was that the front arms provided the power to move forward and the mid section would swing forward while being supported by the front two hands and the spidery legs at the back. The mid section would flex and bend and give the creature the agility to change direction, twist and turn to snap with those huge teeth. 

The creature could stand on the mid section but only to gain momuntary height to see prey. It would then drop back down onto the front two hands to continue. The creature would be a night stalker that waited and ambushed prey rather than chasing it down. The three eyes were added to help the creature see in low light.

The strange thing at this stage is that I didn't have much idea about the size of this creature. I initially had just imagined, assumed it would be about the size of a crawling man. With much larger hands than that of a normal sized male. It was something I'd have to think about and quick because this was beginning to come together as a concept.

I wanted the surface to be fibrous, like tendons that grow and hold the creature together, but mixed in there with dense bone. I called it Plant Creature because of the initial thumbnails and I liked the transparency of the sketch in the previous post. I indicated this here in foreground hand where you can see its darker in colour. However it had started to look more like it was made of flesh and bone which I didn't want, because it reminded me of a Resident Evil type design.

Light played a role in the predatory role this creature used to catch its prey, it used its transparent skin to bend light helping it to blend into its environment. I used a simple filter in Photoshop to produce the slimy look (Plastic Wrap) it gives nice specular hits to sell the surface texture. Thats all for now... Thanks for reading!

The whole illustration was done in Photoshop using a wacom tablet. 

Plant Creature 02/04

Taking the design to the next stage I wanted to flesh out the creature. I was trying not only to give more volume, but I was also experimenting with the surface texture as I was sketching. Using the brushes in Photoshop I started to experiment with the blending modes. I find the technique useful because it gives a translusence effect, rather like that of a bug where you can see all its bits moving around inside.

At this stage I was only really concerned with the front section of the creature, the back was added later. I wanted the long creepy fingers to remain from the thumbnails. I added the three eyes imagining them to be fixed on a movable fleshy part of the head. No mouth was indicated and the boney spine curved back into a pelvis type area which was under developed. Thanks for viewing...

Plant Creature 01/04

The first of 4 images showing the progression of a plant creature design. The sketches were very basic however the image on the left caught my attention. The reason for choosing this one I think came from the movie Poltergeist - the ghostly spirit at the top of the stairs in the original movie, was very cool. So I decided to go with this one.

The other designs were OK, I liked the 2nd from the Right because it had no particular definition, just out of control growth reaching out in all directions. So this maybe something I come back to in another project. These were created in SketchBook Pro using the BallPoint Pen Tool. The grey hint of a shadow really helps to ground the design with very little effort. Thanks for viewing, I'll get the next development post out quickly.

Mascot Ideas

So busy recently and a lot of things up in the air after moving, been a crazy few months! However I found this sketch from a while back and thought it looked cool. I did these when asked to come up with some ideas for a football/soccer mascot. Quite a few things wrong with these but a good starting point and push them as a 3D sculpt in the future.

The mascot had to be strong in physical appearance to intimidate the opposition, but also have an appeal to young fans. They were created in SketchBook Pro initially and then taken into Painter for line work and colouring. I worked on a range of expressions for each concept. However these 3 concepts and the initial brief were dropped in favour of the 'Star' concept which was created later. You can see the final concept and design HERE at the bottom of the page. There are also more characters complete with development sketches in the link... Hope you find it useful.