Joe Caleno's Blog

  This is the revisited version of my second concept art drawing. I have filled some of that empty space up with extra details. There are two extra pipes, one on each side, pipes in the background, cloud, more water and extra sky details.  

 These copper baths will be perfect for my work. The shine on them will be very interesting to model. I  really like the colour of them. They will fit into the rest of Armilla really well. They have a very rounded shape which will be fun to model in my opinion. 

  I could also go down the Mario pipes cartoon look. These stereotypical cartoon pipes would be perfect for modelling. They are simple shapes and everyone knows what they are by just looking at them. The bottom left picture is very crowded. It almost looks like how we imagine Armilla to look. 

  Pipes aren't always evenly spaced out and going in the same direction. I started looking at wires and trees. Crossed wires are very unorganised and untidy. Pipes can be like this too, laying on top of each other, crossing each other's paths. Trees are all jumbled up together too. Trees also rise up high. In my Travelogue, I explained how the pipes remind me a lot of a forest. Comparing the pipes to trees also tells the reader some information about the size of the pipes. 

  I began modelling a test pipe in Maya. When the time comes and I have to make my actual model I might come across some problems. Doing a practice run gave me the chance to come across and fix those problems. I will also be familiar with what I am doing in the final thing when I have done it already before.   This here is just a tube shape, i have not created the tube i want.

  Annotations written out: When I went back and looked at this drawing, I realised that I have been relying on depth to show perspective. So, I started experimenting with the rectangle tool and the perspective option. Now, I will be able to work faster and use actual perspective in my drawings.  These clouds also help to make the drawing look 3D. The pipes in the background are faded. Thus makes them look far away and not as important as the pipes closer to us. The path also adds some perspective.  Now looking at it, I can see that it looks very empty. I need to add more to it so it looks more like a city. 

  These pipes have a lot going on with them. After finishing my final concept designs I realized that a lot of my pipes looked fairly plain. The extra details on these pipes will help break up the textures. It will also give the viewer more to look at and will make the pipes seem more lifelike. I want to focus on making my city seem more lived in. It is very easy to make the mistake of drawing buildings and living areas very uniform. If you do this, the city looks like it is brand new and no one and moved in just yet.  Below is my drawing experimenting with the pipe above. Once I finished this, I had a tutorial with Simon and I found a way to work faster. This would then allow me to add more detail in a shorter amount of time. This was made with the rectangle tool, gradient fill and the perspective option.

  Armilla, where to begin... I could hear Armilla from what seemed like miles away. The sound of rushing water echoed. I could also smell it. It didn't smell as nice as I thought it would. It did have a soapy smell about it but I couldn't help but notice this awful eggy smell. At one point, when walking past a giant pipe that was as thick as a giant redwood's trunk, I had to cover my nose! Armilla's pipes are much much bigger than you think. They make you feel so insignificant and minuscule. They really reminded me of trees, the way they branch off into other smaller pipes. The entire city looks like a pipe forest. After walking for some time, I reached a little orange pipe which was spraying water everywhere and making the ground around it very muddy. It was then I noticed the hundreds of shower heads that were on the pipes. A few of them were running water. There was a lot of water that was being wasted. Some pipes were leaking gallons upon gallons of water. When I wa...

 

 

  These pipes are perfect to use as reference for my concept designs. When I was reading Armilla's description these were the sort of pipes i was thinking about.    

 

  Concept Painting 

 

 

 

 

 The Start.

 

  The Start.

 

The start. 

 

 The 100 Thumbnails.  

 Influence Maps. You can see here that I am really starting to think about the aesthetics of Armilla.

The 100 Thumbnails task only took me just 2 days to complete. I thought that it was an enjoyable task. It allowed me to think creatively. I love books where you can imagine the scene. The invisible cities book was very good at describing the scene.  The photos above show some examples of the drawings. My favourite city to draw was Armilla. I feel like this city has the most character. Armilla is the city I am going to be focussing on. 

 Perspective Drawings 3. This sketch took me a while. I found it hard working out how the top of the building would look. I still don't think it's perfect because I drew it free hand. However, now I know that drawings like this look better drawn with a ruler.  My first attempt went very wrong. My first attempt at one point perspective is below. Now looking at it, I can see how wrong the perspective is. It looks like a strange abstract drawing of a tunnel.