2D Art Assignments 1-4
For this period we had 4 assignments to work on for 2D Art class. In this post, I'll go through all 4 assignments and will try to briefly describe what I did and what my thought process was.
ASSIGNMENT 1: Observation (Big, Medium, and Small shapes)
So for the first assignment, we were given a few small examples of characters where we can apply the "Big, Medium, and Small Shapes" theory. In these examples, we were asked to take a closer look at the shapes of the character and block out the big, medium, and small shapes of it. Here are the examples:
I used the colors red, orange, and yellow with red being the big shapes, orange being the medium shapes, and yellow being smaller shapes. These colors essentially block a certain part of a character design. So red blocks out the main shape of the character, orange blocks out any medium shapes in the character and yellow blocks out any detail in the character.
I found this a good way to exercise recognizing big, medium, and small shapes as we observe along the way. We were taught how to focus on bigger shapes first because they're more recognizable and then work our way down until the smallest detail.
ASSIGNMENT 2: Apply to your own work
After doing the first part of the assignment, we were tasked to apply this theory on our own work. We were given the choices to find 2 art works or make one yourself and apply the big, medium, and small theory on said artwork. So I chose to make my own artwork and applied the theory as seen in these screenshots below:
The left image shows the original illustration without the block out, the right image shows the shape block out. I also showed which color is represents which shape as you can see on the side of the right image.
I think I learned a lot from this exercise and this assignment as a whole and will surely apply this in my next illustrations. It taught me how to focus on the main object or shape first, thinking about the bigger picture first before working my way down to the details. Because details don't matter until the final phase of your work.
ASSIGNMENT 3: Evolution
In assignment 3 we were introduced to "Evolution". Evolution means that something evolves into something even bigger or better. For this assignment we had to choose a number that was based on an object. We didn't know the what the object ws beforehand, so everyone randomly chose a number. My number corresponded to a fountain (I forgot what my number was) so I had to draw 3 evolutions of a fountain.
The top image is what I used as reference for the first fountain evolution. The rest was built up and made-up as I went through my work. Left is the silhouette, right is the greyscaling. I didn't know what greyscaling was at the beginning, so I kind of tried to shade things out by working from dark to light.
Honestly, I got a little stuck along the way because I didn't know how my evolutions would look like. So I was struggling a bit with the design. But I learned that you can come a long way when you use references.
ASSIGNMENT 4: Sources
So in out last assignment, we were observations and researching on how to use references. The key to use references is to only pick out a few images and mark down what you like/what inspires you and use that to your advantage in your work. Which was helpful but also a bit challenging for me.
Once again, we had choose numbers. But this time, it was for a theme. You use your object that you used on your previous assignment and combine it with the theme you get. So my object was a fountain and my theme was something about Indian Architecture.
I started by looking up references for both a fountain and Indian Architecture, then I marked down what I like about the design of both the fountain and the architecture after I made the inspiration board.
On the left image I circled what I liked about some of the fountain designs and decided to add that in my final product. I did the same thing on the right image, but then for the Indian architecture. After doing a bit of research, I finally got to work on my final product.
This time I figured out how to greyscale my work properly. I wasn't sure how to give details to the floating island so I didn't touch it. I only shaded the two towers and the house (the object in the middle). The idea was that water was sprinkling down from the top and covers the entire object in water, except when you're inside the "house".
I've learned quite a lot from the assignments I did and it was interesting to learn more about the aesthetics of drawing or designing a character or an asset. Learning about the big, medium, and small shapes will be an essential tool to have in my workflow. So, looking back at the work I did, I had some troubles long the way but I managed to work them out. In the end, we all learned from our mistakes.
