Skill Test & Introduction to Drawing - Game Artist Toolkit (Week 1-2)

This blog post is a couple weeks late as I completely forgot to publish it. This blog post contains my work from Week 1-2. Here, I will go over my value study of Caravaggio's David with Head of Goliath, 4 timed sketches and a pose of a cat running.

The blog post in which I talk about the fundamentals of art is linked here:
https://aprilbunnyboo.blogspot.com/2024/10/2d-principles-game-artist-toolkit.html

Value Study


Caravaggio's David with Head of Goliath




Here I attempted to create the shape of the face with only the shadows. There are hard shadows cast on the right while the left shows intricate features like his nose and the bridge between. I think I could've used a lighter value as in the original painting, you can still see his facial features and a soft reflective light on his jawline.

Master Study

Here, I attempted to recreate one of Leonardo Da Vinci's artworks in order to study how value creates depth. Towards the eyes, I have used a much darker colour to make his eyeball appear under the eyebrow, as well as the wrinkles creating depth on his face. On the nose, I used thicker lines to define that feature specifically. 

Leonardo Da Vinci - 15th Century



Timed Sketches

For this exercise, we were tasked with sketching poses from reference in a specific time frame, with each deduction in time minimising the detail in the sketches.


I spent 3 minutes on sketching a woman holding a gun in a menacing way. I actually really like how this turned out as you can easily make out what's going on in the sketch.


For this sketch, my time was reduced to 1 minute. This reference was a person holding their hands to their chest. Though the basic details are there, some finer details like the hands are missing due to the shorter time frame.


This sketch was given 30 seconds. The pose was a guy stretching over. I decided to block out the shape of the reference rather than focus on little details, which is to why the legs look crooked.


Lastly, I was given 10 seconds to sketch a pose from reference. I had cut down to using circles and lines due to the constrained timeframe. I wasn't even able to draw the legs here. The pose was some guy stretching his limbs out, though in 10 seconds, I wasn't able to capture that.

Cow Enveloping & Negative Space: Measuring Exercise 



Reference: Cow Lying Down near a Fence, Paulus Potter. (1650)

I blocked out the outer shape of Potter's cow drawing to understand how he utilises negative space in his drawing. I did two drawings, one emphasising the shape of the background and one shaping the cow and fence itself. 

The technique of enveloping in art refers to artists utilising light, shadows and atmosphere to create a sense of unity and cohesion in the drawing.

Homework

My homework was to draw an animal running in an environment. Naturally, I decided to draw a cat running on a meadow as one of the biggest inspirations that got me into art in the first place was drawing cats!

I looked up references of cat running poses from cat run cycles in order to figure out where the paws would be in the air.

Cat Run Cycle Guide - by Juicyfruitgirly 

I found this very useful run cycle frame by frame, I decided to reference from the third frame where one paw is reaching to touch the floor and the other paws are still in the air.


I realise now that how the tail is positioned in the reference swings back into a curve while in my drawing it looks more like in the last frame.

I also think that the ear positioning could do a lot more work and I think the torso should be a bit more hidden to where you can't really see the belly too much. I also think the eye shapes need more work as they're not proportional.

One thing I do like that went well in this sketch is the general structure of the cat. The anatomy is close to accurate as I could try. The hindlegs bend because they're pouncing off the ground while the front paws are stretched out. I think I could've exaggerated this a little bit so that the paws don't look 2D.

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