Final Exam: Critique Welcome!

BnBGobo99 wrote:Please let me know what I can do to improve the image.

Imagine how your scene would look in Blender rendered only with ambient occlusion ( without textures even ), and try to aim for that in the earlier stages of your draft instead of clearly defined lines.

V1 Specifics:
Before I took this class I didn’t really draw very much, but I did a lot of 3D work (see [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] for some samples)--so I like to create something that doesn’t exist. “v1.jpg” is something from my mind that I thought might be neat to try.

1. Cloth: I’ll have flowing curtains behind the figurines with folds at the bottom and deep “pockets” at the top between the rungs.
2. Depth: I’ll have to figure out a way to incorporate this, but I was thinking I could use the wood shavings and maybe some tools fading off into the back.
3. Texture: I’ll try to make the figurines the same as Willow Tree’s “Promise” statue. I’ll do that by making shading to simulate the grooves caused by the tools. They will be partially carved out of a wood block that will have some wood grain texture. The lighting will be softened on the unpainted wood and sharper on the painted wood by altering the highlight width. The tool boxes off to the side will be iOS-type glass icons. There will be sharp highlights around the edges and the tops will be lighter than the bottoms.

BnBGobo99 wrote:I welcome any advice or tips you can provide!

I wanted to share how I make my angle measurements.  In the previous discussion I said I used a compass thingy, but I neglected to say I use it in conjunction with my viewfinder.  My viewfinder is a bit different than what the book shows.

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It's a 99-cent 4x6 picture frame I bought at Walmart that you would use on a refrigerator.  I pealed the magnet off and drew a 4x4 grid.  I make a 4x4 grid on my paper by lightly-lightly drawing lines with an equal aspect ratio (which is easy, because our newsprint and drawing paper is in the same aspect ratio--just ~16 times as large).

I then slide the compass inside and align the compass up with an angle on my still life (in the above image I'm aligning with my drawing--but let's pretend that's my still life, lol).  Keep the viewfinder/picture-frame facing you without any vertical or horizontal tilt--make it like it was your iPhone and you are looking directly at the screen, if that makes any sense.  If you tilt it, the whole thing will be off.

Then go to your paper and place the viewfinder+compass flat against the paper.  Put a ruler along the compass angle and slide the viewfinder+compass out of the way so you can run your graphite/charcoal along the ruler's edge.

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Use your viewfinder's gridlines as placement guides for your drawing.  Look for areas where an object crosses a gridline and mark that same area on your paper.  Then all you have to worry about is connecting the arc or line from gridline to gridline.

Make sure you line up your viewfinder the same each time.  You can do this easily by making note of where a few items are in relation to the viewfinder's outer edges. (In my case it was the tripod was in the 3rd row/1st column's edge and the table crossed over the 4th row/2nd & 3rd column border.)

Based on what I've noticed in my routine, doing it this way makes drawing so much easier and accurate, but it does take a lot more time.