Week 3 - Crustacean Silhouettes

This task was very interesting and the quick tutorial we saw by Feng Zhu was really cool. We were to essentially take a technique where you scribble some thick black paint quickly down to try and make a form. This ends up being 50% random and 50% planned, which makes the technique very fast to create nice unique shapes. After the black silhouette is created you can start adding some lighter values to the interior to give the detail you need. The tutorial we watched was on random monsters but we were tasked at doing it for crustaceans. Below are some of the images that I got inspiration from.

Looking at these they have a few things in common, they have rules which I would need to create the basic shapes. They had shells, to hard edges, they have spindly legs, and have beady eyes. They are mostly symmetrical but there are types that are asymmetrical like the top middle image. Also, even though they have hard shells, they may not actually be flat, like may have little notches or barnacles for instance. Below are my 3 designs using the technique.

I think my attempt was good, but not great. I found the initial design in blocking in the basic shapes very easy to create the type of shell or legs that I envisioned. I also completed this fairly quickly. The details and change in lighting is the part that I found more difficult. This takes me too much time if I were to do it properly. Even in the tutorial, Feng Zhu says how these designs are supposed to be quick to get ideas down and move on so they can be shown to clients etc. So I tried not to shade them for too long, even though I think I really needed to as I'm not fully happy with all the values. I also found it more difficult to create the details on the inside of the bodies, even after finding the shaping easy. Even with references, doing the smaller details in the shadowed areas, or just in the large shapeless parts, the design didn't come as naturally to me and I had to put more effort in to think about the possible anatomy.