Lillian Chen Art: vehicle design

Showing posts with label vehicle design. Show all posts

Monday, July 30, 2018

Vehicle and character design pairing

As a challenge prompt from a Facebook artists' group, I designed a character and vehicle. It was definitely something new where I had to consciously make something look damaged, as the prompt involved an escapee and their get away vehicle.

For the character design, I wanted to challenge myself with making an armored character, and began sketching helmet designs. Once I found a couple I liked, I began working on the full character silhouette.

The initial character sheet's layout started pretty much as above, with the character's illustration on the side.

Eventually, I decided the back light beam was too much and took it off, and began working on the character's lighting.

After taking away the line drawing underneath, and cleaning up some areas, I changed the layout after receiving some construct critiques on the model portion of the sheet, and hard edge indications.

During these edits and changes, I was also working on the vehicle design along side the character, progressing at the same time.

There were tons of thumbs I went through as I was figuring out what to use as a design.

My idea was to have a small ship, one that wouldn't take a large crew to fly, especially since the character was escaping, and most likely had little to no time to get a crew. Design wise, I also wanted the ship to hold some similarities to the character. The two tails on the back were part of that design.

The damages I envisioned were from ramming into objects during the escape, with bullet holes from people trying to stop the character from escaping. The main section that had the bullet holes was the cockpit area, as the guns were aimed at the character. Another area I thought about was the crew area, where the smaller windows were, but the windows were too small and might have made the holes unreadable.

I then decided that the piece where the smaller windows were was too messy so I brought the paint back and thought about indents above that section of the ship. However, in the end, it didn't make sense with the shape of the ship, and I couldn't think of a logical way for the damage to end up there.

Similarly, I scaled down some of the other damages on the ship, and cleaned up the orthographic drawing.

Towards the end of this challenge, I caught myself more on the lack of hard edges when I was painting, which was good, now that I could catch myself on it. Going forward, I definitely need to use hard edges more, or at least, while I'm painting, jump back and forth from hard edges and soft.

Friday, June 1, 2018

Research Sub R2 (vehicle design)

presentation sheet with orthographic and some original thumbnails

This was the original thumbnail sketch I took and blew up to start filling up spaces. I added railings for stability once the sub returned to the main ship for docking. I also added many, many lights and windows.

I told myself that if I wanted to have a cleaner painting, I needed to create a good line drawing. I still hate making a super clean line drawing since it always look stiff afterwards but I kept the lines as clean as possible before going back and filling in a flat value for the silhouette.

From there, the purple background wasn't dark enough for me to see any loose paint lines so I filled in with a nearly black. (It's actually a really desaturated dark blue.)

And from there, once I filled in a solid single value for silhouette purposes, I started actually painting in the value differences while keeping things very desaturated and monochromatic to avoid going too crazy on colors early. I found at times, I tend to pick too many colors at once and it gets crazy quick.

Once the solid values were in place, I started painting in shadow and light. After that, I started using the soft light blending mode for the brush and adding in colors to see what looked nice together. I wanted to keep yellow as a primary so I tried various oranges and purples but the purple I had picked looked odd for a submarine color scheme. I threw on the purple and then started playing with the Color Balance layer adjustment to find a good mix I wanted. I went towards a warm magenta orange-yellow balance. Once that was in place, I painted in the highlights and eventually wear and dirt/rust.

It was a nice change of pace to actually draw the cleaner line, rather than my usual loose sketch - paint over method. I also separated the layers more than I would usually, something I started implementing during the #mermay art challenge drawings. It definitely helped keep things within the silhouette and also allowed me to keep each blending mode on its own which let me keep things organized in a different but helpful way. Particularly the soft light layer painting could be kept away from the overlays and the color dodge and extra highlights could be on their own.

Friday, December 29, 2017

Teens of Valor - Tower

The Tower design was something I wanted to try my hand at, since most of the times I've been designing vehicles or space ships. The original design in my comic, "Teens of Valor", was a cylinder shape, and really bland.

I'm glad I went ahead and tried to design a space tower. The design is a bit crazy I'll admit but it definitely got a unique silhouette, haha.

Ship 20

Continuing with switching topics up, I wanted to paint a sci-fi spaceship.

Thumbnail sketches.

Constructing the ship

I really enjoyed designing and painting out the ship. I'm pretty happy with the end result as it looked finished and I could feel good adding it to my portfolio.

There were plenty of good thumbnails I plan on painting out in the future, which is always a plus.

Tuesday, May 17, 2016

Two projects, busy two (or so) weeks!

Character design around a family aspect, but anchored in elemental powers (water, fire earth and air (clouds/sky)) and Japanese culture. To be specific, the idea was based on the Godai /Five Elements (Japanese philosophy) but without the void part of the elements.

The temple in the background a real life temple in Okinawa (Gokoku-ji , which means "Protection of the Nation Temple). The reason I chose this temple, aside from the shape, was because of the family's last name, Gushiken, meaning "strong willed", comes from Okinawa origin.

Similarly, the names of the characters are based off their element in Japanese. Some are more direct while others are a bit loosely based.
"Mizu", meaning water, became Mizuki.
"Ka", or "hi meaning fire, and "Kaen", meaning blaze, stayed the same.
"Chi" or "Tsuchi" meaning Earth became Daichi (which could be literally translated as 'big earth' )
"Sora" mean sky, stayed the same. (Cloud in Japanese is 'kumo' but making a female name from that didn't work out.)

The other project I've been working on!

The idea, after various thumb nails , was to either have the vehicle on a racetrack, or in a workshop. I ended up picking the workshop idea for better dramatic lighting.

I posted the character and vehicle design parts on the previous post I made. Eventually these will be posted onto my dA and/or website. for a bigger view of those pieces, but parts have been posted onto my Instagram.