Galleon project: It's alive!

I decided to let the Diorama project breathe for a while and work on the Galleon project. My goal is to have it all finished - the 3D model and the final 3 point perspective view - by the end of the week so I don't have to worry about it during the hollidays.

As usual, digital painting consumes a hell lot of time I have. But It usually pays off, too. I had these really ruff and ugly sillouettes that actually turned into something beautiful (and I also gave a personal touch to it - as I was feeling this kind of project is not "me").

I firstmade 6 main sillouttes, but I plan to make some more just to play with it a bit. But because time is short for this one, I decided to go further with the project with these 6 primary sillouettes anyway. I kinda messed up because on the lecture we were given the galleon task, I went upstairs to the Cintiq room to work on it, because all the tablets were being used by third years. What happened was that our tutor said flying ships were alright, but he didn't want any balloons or engines. Well, well, I wasn't there to hear that, and guess what: I had a lot of balloons. But that's okay. I talked to him about it and he said I could continue using my original sillouettes with the balloons. Thank you Lord.

Now, making the sillouettes went way better than I expected. As I had never drawn ships or galleons or anything like this before, I was scared nothing would turn out. But I gathered A LOT of references and I was surprised by how It actually helped me! I did make a galleon. Six of them. And I might say, I'm quite proud of them!

The personal touch I spoke of is the unicorn decal. If you know me, you can instantly say these drawings are mine. I could go for something more creative, but I thought unicorns were just a great idea for a pirate ship (I'm serious, I love this expectation break).

My chosen sillouette was the last one. At first I didn't know what to do with it, I had so much work to reach this point of detail that I was just satisfied with it (until I actually looked at the Brief and saw the detailed galleon there - I was ashamed of mine). So I started very slow just fixing a couple of things here and there, like the balloon shape, It was kinda awkward back then.

Then I actually had to repaint some other things instead of just trying to improve it - It's very difficult to me to have a brush work on top of an existing brush work, I just never know what to do... I definetely have to be more confident and just go for it and risk It all.

Above is the sillouette and it's further development. I like to have both images next to each other to see the process I have made since I started.

I must confess I felt a little lost drawing the sails ropes, because I didn't have any idea of how sails actually work. I had to search a lot to finally understand where and how they should be placed in the ship.

Once I had the further developed sillouette done, It was time to model the basic shapes of the galleon on 3Ds Max and use the block-out technique to create a 3 point perspective view of the final ship! I used a plane with the .png file to start modelling and everything went smooth and sweet. I decided not to model every single element to save some time.

After having all the basic shapes modelled, I took a couple of screenshots and went to Photoshop to create the 3 point perspective lineart. This part of the project was the most exausting, maybe because It was the last part and I was already fed up with everything, I had so many little details I had to leave some of them behind for my own sake.

However, I did learn a couple of new techniques, like using a white brush with a stroke layer style to create the ropes and using the pen tool. I struggled a little with the perspective at the end, but everything ended up being just fine.

I realised why the balloon was a bad idea when I had to draw all the ropes falling off of It again at this point. But hey, I survived! Here is the final 3-point-perspective drawing of my Galleon!