Do you sketch out your ideas?

[Gilvan Blight]

Nope never. I can sketch but I\'ve never applied the skill to mini painting. I generally just sit down and start painting. I\'ve recently picked up a colour wheel and now spend a bit more time before I start planning, but still no sketching.

 

[Einion]

Sometimes yes, sometimes no depending partly on whether it\'s a scratchbuild or a conversion.

In recent years, even for a very heavy conversion, I often work without a sketch as I can visualise things as I go but early on I found it very useful to put something down on paper to guide the sculpting/building work.

At the very least it\'s useful to keep a sketchpad of ideas for poses, concepts, even just portions of a figure, a weapon or scene/setting so that inspiration doesn\'t get lost.

Einion

 

[No Such Agency]

Originally posted by generulpoleaxe
my drawing skills are unter pants

So are mine, but at times I\'ve drawn the figure crudely with marker, then \"coloured it in\" with the paint colours I want... just to make sure it won\'t unexpectedly look bad

 

[Farin]

@amazonianwarrior: nice programm you got there. any chance that a normal person can get it, or is it one of thiese insanely expensive programms for profesionals ?

@ Scott:

I make pretty pictures using.... SCIENCE!

lol

okay back to topic:

i´m unimagenable bad when it comes to scetching , so i rarely make any, even so i think i should. the few i have are hidden in my bookshelve.
the weird thing is, as a kid, i was actually pretty good at sketching. i remember how we draw comics in artclass , and the teacher even said that mine was great. Okay that was like 6th grade, but still - today i suck even at simple things, My worst moment in college was when we had to do technical sketchings for a class on construction. It took me 3 days , and the first thing a friend asked me when i showed it was \"what happened to your sketches - they look awful \" . and he was right :|~

by the way, does any of you guys know a good text book for learning how to sketch ???
i ´ve seen alot of drawing books at amazon.com , but i have no idea which one to take.

any tip would be great :beer:

 

[rocketandroll]

I sketch stuff most of the time before I start work on it... I also often write a little description or back-story if I\'m doing a character figure, partly because I find it helps me visualise it as I\'m going along and remember small details I wanted to include, and partly because I\'m crap at drawing figures

Certainly if I\'m doing a diorama or something with a very complex base I\'ll plan that out at the start to make sure the composition looks right and everything will fit.

Or if, like now, I\'m designing a vehicle completely from scratch I\'ll design that fully on paper first and then use those drawings to make up the CAD files or whatever is needed to manufacture the parts.

Then again I sketch for work as well so I always keep an A4 hardback sketch book with me at all times, get through about one every three or four months so I have a library of them now going back ten years or so


Ben

 

[cybersquig]

I sketch to get my ideas down before they slip my mind, but it\'s always very rough. Beyond that I tend to have a pretty good abstract processing capacity and spatial awareness, so I can \'paint\' it in my mind fairly confidently. One of the benefits of being dyslectic (o:

In year nine (dunno what that is in american), when I was 14-15 anyway, I was told by my art teacher to drop it, because I had absolutely no talent or potential. That\'s a quote. Now my golden demons say she was wrong... I\'m quite grateful to her for the motivation though!

What I do often do, especially if i\'m sculpting, is use one of those wooden manakins (sp?) - you know the ones you get in art shops. You can only bend the limbs like on a real person, so the pose is always natural which is cool. I often find a pic of someone in the pose I want too to get a feel for how they\'d look.

 

[darklord]

i dont doany sketches i just pick a mini and paint usually (which is why they often turn out crap! i will generally have an idea of an overall \'feel\' i want to go with. the mini im just finishing however is one where i knew exactly how i wanted it too look and reasoned why it would in my head

 

[Amazon warrior]

Originally posted by Farin
@amazonianwarrior: nice programm you got there. any chance that a normal person can get it, or is it one of thiese insanely expensive programms for profesionals ?

Nope, it\'s absolutely free! Just google \"POVray 3.6\". Go to the homepage and follow the download links. Be prepared for a steep learning curve, tho! It\'s all code-based so you type in something like:

sphere { <0,0,0>, 1 pigment { rgb <1,0,0>} }

which the program then renders to create a red sphere at the origin of the coordinate system (x, y and z). Fortunately, the Help file really does help and gets you doing interesting things quite quickly. I like it because it makes me think- you need to be aware of your maths and trigonometry! There are lots of helpful links on the website tho, they\'re worth a look. That\'s where I found the way to make the tinsel and tree (not directly, I combined two quite different things to get what I wanted).

 

[Farin]

@amazon warrior

thanks:beer:. when i got time after my examens i will try it.

by the way, when i looked at your example, i understood it immediatly - good to know that i exactly learned something in my math classes.

@rocketandroll: when i paint new minis for my tabletop armies, i also read the background material to get a feeling for it and the mood. I think one of the few advantages of GW´s armybooks is actually theat it gives them the space to tell the players what the idea behind an army is ( bavarian, noble,... ).

it´s also the reason why i own all five warmachine books

 

[StarFyre]

hmm

what is tempting, is to download zBrush. It\'s used by companies like ILM for making models, which can then be imported into Maya or SoftImage.

The thing about Zbrush is that, it works like sculpting as opposed to the spline, polygon or nurbs methods of modelling in other programs.

A lot of artists love it for making 3Dmodels.

If only I had a 3D milling machine like Scibor

Sanjay

 

[PegaZus]

Originally posted by StarFyre
If only I had a 3D milling machine like Scibor

Er, actually, you just need to find somebody with a 3D printer! Quick Google turned up Xpress3D. I choose them out of the three I looked at because I\'ve played around with Zcorp\'s printer. I\'ve got zero clue as to how much they will charge, but I know when I was operating our machine, our costs were in the $1-$2 per cubic inch range. Granted, we were using the cheapest stuff.

Anyway, I\'m not sure about what formats ZBrush puts out, but if one of the is STL, you\'re golden. I know some other formats are acceptable as well, but I\'ll stick with what I know for sure.

One last caveat in this yet-another-thread-jack, the smaller the object, the harder it is to use the 3D printers. But it would be interesting to see if they could do it for a reasonable price.

 

[hestan101]

well, i have one bonus. I am the definition of art travesty, but my teachers are convinced i have talent . as for thread jacking, no problem, i find it all interesating

 

[Amazon warrior]

Originally posted by Farin
@amazon warrior

thanks:beer:. when i got time after my examens i will try it.

by the way, when i looked at your example, i understood it immediatly - good to know that i exactly learned something in my math classes.

Cool, glad to be of help! I hope you have fun with it.

 

[freakinacage]

i sometimes sketch. it rarely ends up like the sketch though.

 

[boristfrog]

I can\'t draw - but I make mental notes and collect \'mood board\' images that maybe contain some of the colours or textures I\'m after as reference. But I generally only work on one thing at a time so I don\'t get too confused. I guess I do sketch stuff out in the computer with some early photos I take of my models if I need to.

 

[Cleezy]

I generally sketch a lot of larger ideas, particularly ideas i have for diorama\'s and battlescenes etc.

I haven\'t fully had chance to act on my sketches, but i know that if i have an idea sketched out its stored if i need to refer to it.

I always annotate sketches as well, with possible variations, colours and materials that could be used for the piece.

If i was to scratchbuild i would need to have some sort of art to go on whether something i sketched or concept art the piece is based on

 

[Wren]

I occasionally do colour sketches - a really rough sketch of the general proportions of areas of the figure then paint in the colours I\'m thinking about using to see if they work together in the proportions that would be used on the figure. Usually I\'m lazier than that and just do colour swatches, but the other method is probably a little better.

 

[Bigdennis52]

I used to never plan out my projects, but as my time has lessened I like to keep a little spiral notebook handy and mark down my ideas / concepts so I dont lose my progress