A mainstream galleon

I was pretty concerned with the hand in dates for the current projects and I was measuring every second to get everything done in time. I thought our final project this semester would be just the Diorama but oh how wrong I was. On week 9 we were presented the brief for the Visual Studies final project: a galleon or sailing ship.

Even though I'm drowning in my delayed assets, I am very excited with this project, mainly because It's totally out of my confort zone. I have never drawn a galleon, or a sailing ship or even a boat in my entire life! I've been drawing people since forever and this course has finally gotten me to do new things.

I was so excited that my references board turned up to be HUGE. I started with common ships, then I went to airships, and then to steampunk airships, and then It took me forever to finally decide what I was going for. At the end, I'm going for the mainstream airships, but I still have to make it look like a XV century galleon and can't just make a Bioshock or Final Fantasy thing.

The first steps to create the galleon is to draw a single silhouette and then copy it about 20 times and use the transform tools and change the details. At the end of this process we have some semi detailed options and we get to choose what silhouette we are going to work with. Below there are the first two silhouettes I had: