Art Style Mixing

The final assignment was to draw a character in three different art styles, specifically Marek Okon, Ashley Wood and Sean Galloway.

Marek's art style is highly detailed using low amounts of detail, relying on shading to create definition. Most of his work with humans are merged with photographs, but some of his other work is not.

Ashley Wood's style is the complete opposite, using heavy and light strokes in a wild fashion along with some colour shading and halftone patterns in some cases. 

Sean Galloway's art style is fairly comic-like, featuring minimal shading, soft palettes and distorted proportions. 

All of these styles are difficult in their own ways, but I found Marek's to be (bizarrely) the easiest of the three:. Ashley Wood's style was the middle ground, having some trouble replicating it, but making something vaguely similar in the process. What I really struggle with is Sean Galloway's. This style to me is near impossible to get right, to the point where I wanted to focus only on the shading. I will likely come back to this at a later date. 

Environment design

Environment design isn't something I am particulatly confident about doing, but it something I'm willing to try my hand with. 

Going around Manchester taking pictures of various perspectives and points of interest made things easier once I found a good shot of Salford Central station:. 

Then there was coming up with a decent aesthetic. This wasn't too difficult, as I really wanted to try Viktor Antonov's design points. Using a picture of the Combine APC, I had a colour palette and geometric shape reference to work with.  

After attempting several pylon styles, I made and duplicated a good looking one along the track lines, along with other structures that conform to the Fibonacci spiral..

After repeated experiments the base colours were added along with a sky colour to contrast it. 

After lots of painting in of the other details with the right kind of shading lights on a monolithic building in the background and some rain,  I managed to finish hwat turned out to be a really atmospheric landscape! 

Vehicle and pilot design

Designing a vehicle and the person driving it is something I like to do as well, but coming up with ideas proved difficult.

My first vehicle and armour design was based on a vehicle designed to traverse a desert environment.

I looked at several mecha designs, but could never come up with a suitable one until I referenced insectoid anatomies and found the right kind of shape.

Based on a wasp, this was designed to move quickly over sand dunes and hide in them if need be.

The pilot was designed with a similar theme, sporting visual equipment and a poncho. He was designed to give a childish feel but with an adult role, to make him seem like part of another species.

However, the tank was a little too close to a Tachikoma from Ghost in the Shell and the pilot was generally not drawn well, so I decided to do something different;  

The vehicle is based heavily on the ships from the wipEout games, something of which influences me in many facets of vehicle design. 

The pilot's design is based somewhat on designs used for anti-g suits, but the pose was found from this reference. Unfortunately, the design isn't as good as I'd have liked, but it works well with Marek Okon's art style.