Second piece of concept art - Big battle tank

For my second sketch I decided to make a tank. I set out in the usual manner and started to quickly sketch some little thumbnails to generate ideas. Below is a picture of my first ideas.





On the right are some weapon ideas, on the left are some ideas for shapes of the tank. I wanted to keep the tank body quite simple, and concentrate on the tracks and weapon in the sketch. I quite liked the shape in the bottom right of the picture, which for those interested, is copied from the picture below. The picture is taken from here.





I thought it would make an interesting weapon casing. So I set to work sketching a little thumbnail with the shape on the tank, resulting in the following, which I was quite pleased with.






So I decided to sketch this tank in full size. As before I started out with a light pencil sketch using a 5H pencil.





The hardest part was the links on the tracks, the ones at the very front to be exact. It was quite challenging to get the links looking perspectively correct, mainly because they change orientation quite a lot at the front of the track.

Next came the pen phase, as seen below.






Here is a slightly more focused version (my digital camera hates the dark).





I added some black links to the tracks, in an attempt to draw the eye towards them. Still wasn't sure what to do for the actual weapon at this point, but as you can see in the final drawing, I decided to go for just a simple cannon like structure.





I decided to make a wheels a bit more interesting by cutting some shapes out of them, but they ended up looking like smiley faces, so it probably wasn't the best choice of shape. :D

The computer lines connected to the tank are there to fix a perspective mistake I made with one of the panels, see if you can spot it!

I borrowed the cockpits from my previous sketch and used them to give the body a bit more shape, which I think worked quite nicely.

All in all I am quite pleased with the sketch, the tracks provide a nice focal point with their dark colour, and the overall shape looks quite cool.

First piece of concept art - Big ship

Here is my first piece of concept art, inspired by a sketch from Feng Zhu. The image in the top right was the thumbnail I decided to sketch, I quite like the back fin and multiple cockpits.





Here is a closeup view of it





So in my big drawing I sketched it out in pencil first, as seen in the following picture (if you look closely).






When I thought I had the perspective correct, I went over it in pen. Resulting in the following.







The observant reader may notice that I changed the engine support from a triangle like structure to a curvy structure, quite risky business for my first sketch, especially since you can't rub pen out! (And yes I have heard of tipp-ex!) Didn't end up too bad though, I think it matched the rest of the support better than the triangle structure. At this point I wasn't sure that I had the perspective of the side engines correct, something just didn't look quite right about them, but anyway, onwards and upwards!

The next stage was to add some panels and to darken up the vents. I also added some detail to the engines.






Next came the shading, for this I used 3 Letraset cool grey markers, in particular cool grey 1 to 3. I was aiming to get the light source directly above the ship. I also added a bit of paint to some of the panels to make it a bit more interesting.




For my first ever concept sketch, I am quite pleased with the results.

The negatives that I can see are; I am still not sure about the perspective of the engines, the ground shadow ended up a bit streaky, marker bleeding was rife, and there isn't really an attention grabbing part of the image.

Much to work on then!