Perspective and Halfway to Black Practice - Simple Hover Tank

This week we were given the task of practicing our skills of two-point perspective as well as the 'Halfway to Black' method of lighting and shading. We were told to keep our designs simple, with clean, crisp, straight lines so that we could focus on the perspective and the shading, so as a result, my final design is fairly basic with very little detail. I attempted to add detail and some colour on another layer but it retracted from the clean aesthetic and took the focus away from the main intention of this task. I did a number of sketches in my sketchbook to try out the perspective and move the horizon line and vanishing points around. In these sketches, I had some designs which, whilst more detailed and perhaps more interesting than my final design, were too organic and had too many curves and rounded edges, which made this task difficult to do effectively. As a result, I tried to stay away from curves as much as possible. Here are some of the sketches.

I did like this design, and the shape is interesting, but the curved 'wings' made it difficult to show the perspective well, and they tended to distort. I also made the mistake of drawing the boundaries of the page first, rather than drawing the tank first and then planning the composition.

This one is kind of just a large, aggressive iron. It's pretty horrendous and was the reason I steered away from curves for my final design. Though having said that, the perspective looks okay on it, so that's something I suppose.

This was by far my favourite. The perspective and shading looks just right in this sketch so I decided to take it forward. If I was better at drawing curves in perspective, I would have put wheels on this one to add a bit of much needed detail, but I suppose that'll come with practice and confidence eventually. With my final design, I picked out the key lines and made them clean on Photoshop. I also simplified the shading into flat colours as we were told. I'm fairly happy with the outcome, although this looks a little too basic and generic for my taste, I would have liked to add a lot more detail but I didn't want to compromise the overall aesthetic.