101 Sketches, Part the First

Before I show these sketches, I'll say that I am terrified of showing them. I am very self-conscious about my sketches, and ordinarily once they're done I will work from them and then consign them to a box never to look at them again. So showcasing them here is very very scary for me, especially as I feel like I'm dancing around shouting 'Look, world! Look at everything I don't know about concept art!' With that said, here goes nothing.

 

The first thing you will notice is the big blank spaces - that's because I did a few sketches that drew shapes from things other than the object sheets, which I removed when I found out that we had to use only the sheets. These ones I quite like, especially the little bird-slug-thing down in the corner. He's kind of cute.

The second thing you will notice is that I am terrible about sticking within my canvas. This isn't bad cropping, it's bad planning on my part.  I really really like the frilled, strange-mouthed critter in the lower left corner - I am sorely tempted to take that one further.

Ah, machinery, my mortal enemy. The only one of this batch I actually like is the caterpillar train, which is just so silly and impractical I have to love it. The rest are boring, idiotic and unoriginal. I hated drawing every one of these because I struggled so much to think of ways to make machines from the shapes, and it shows.

I hate drawing machines - they don't make sense to me. I am insane about getting details correct, and my lack of knowledge of (and, admittedly, interest in) machines makes it very difficult to design them. By some stroke of luck my brother is a mechanical engineer, so I went to him for advice and he gave me this working definition of a machine;

'A machine is anything that converts energy into motion or produces the energy to do so. They either perform tasks humans cannot do or do tasks humans can do but more efficiently.'

My problem with machines was that I didn't really know exactly what they were - I could point to one and say 'that's a machine all right', but I didn't understand precisely what they were for. The next problem will be actually designing machines that don't look dreadful, but I'll manage.