Perspective and Lighting: Tank

For this homework, we were to design a tank or armoured vehicle and present it using the perspective and value lighting techniques learnt in class. 

Here are some images I used when designing my tank, along with my sketches. 

At first, I looked up some typical designs. Vehicles and weapons are not things I am personally interested in, so at first I found it difficult to come up with something. I thought of trying to combine it with my own interests and thought of a tank that might be used comically in a cartoon aimed at children. I came up with a tank covered in love heart motifs, and planned to colour it appropriately bright. However, I scrapped this idea because I wanted to push myself by doing something out of my comfort zone. A lot of the assignments on this course are out of my comfort zone and I won't learn anything if I don't push myself. So then followed the idea of a stealth tank that is very sleek. I looked at some actual stealth tanks and other similar sleek vehicles before starting on the image in Photoshop.

Following the advice in the brief, I put the first vanishing point slightly to the left and put the second vanishing point about 1.5 the length of the canvas to the right. This helped to keep the image from looking unnaturally distorted. I started by putting in some boxes to get the overall feel for the proportions as well as the perspective, using the shift key to help with straight lines.

As a note, I kept the perspective lines on and created more as I went along until I added the values. I did not include them in the process images below because I wanted to show what I did clearly.

After I was happy with the tank sketch, I made a new layer and turned the perspective lines into path lines. I then put the sketch layer back on but turned the opacity very low so that I could follow it as a guide and began to erase the lines I didn't need. I did this to keep the lines as accurate to the perspective as possible, as I noticed during the sketch stage that it was really easy to create lines that did not go perfectly where they should.

Then I started to add the values. My tank is a bit more complicated than two boxes stuck together, so although I tried to use the halfway to black method we learnt in class, it wasn't as straight forward. Still, I thought referencing this method roughly might end up with more convincing values than if I had just eyeballed it, so I carried on. I started by putting the easiest values in; the top and side planes.

After this, I made the value of each plane the middle value of the planes surrounding it. For example, the plane on the front of the tank that is at an angle, I set the value to half way that of the top plane (40% grey) and the front planes (55% grey), which made it roughly 47%. I used this method for all of the tank then adjusted the values slightly in some areas to make it more convincing.

Here is what I ended up with.

I struggled with painting this as I have a lot of trouble painting flat surfaces without blending values too much, so in the end I left it at this stage. I think that the values could be better and will practice more painting shapes that are more complex than cubes. I am very happy with the design of the tank, although the back end of it looks off. Also, I feel it could be a lot more detailed.