Tutorial: Sketching and Idea Generation - Archive Sketches

When sketching it is important to archive and save your work. Try to get into the habit of saving all work whether you think it’s good or bad. In this video I look through a few of my archived sketches and make comments about them. Don’t forget to subscribe and and be notified of new videos. Tutorial

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 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.