Hey everyone, I’ve been doing a lot of studying this past week on some general art fundamentals and I wanted to make a render to put into practice some things I learned. I tend to model something then move on quickly so I wanted to go back to an earlier model and use it to speed up the process.
This week I have been learning about shapes and composition and using thumbnail sketches to test out ideas. I time boxed myself to a day (I broke this by a tiny bit if I’m being honest) in the hopes of also working to produce faster and let go of some perfectionism.
And this is what I came up with:
This is a scene inspired by an event in my own flat where my cat came face to face with a mouse. Unfortunately for that mouse it didnt come equipped for the challenge, unlike Amiko.
This is the thumbnail sketch I ended on. At first I really struggled with doing these quickly, I was finding myself noodling on them for like an hour at a time. I finally let go and started to let them be flat and uglty and fast but this one I really fell in love with.
I wanted to get across that feeling of unease you sometimes get with an unfamiliar cat, you cant always tell if they will accept you or will attack you at any given moment.
I did this by mixing trianglular shapes and circular shapes to almost confuse the viewer. At first I was hoping to overlap the subjects to give a sense of depth but unfortunately when it came to the render it kinda made it look like Amiko was petting the cat haha, so I seperated them a little.
The only real reference I used for this one was my own cat Evie which this cat is heavily inspired by, in looks, but also her feelings towards mice.
Most of this work was done in Blender; the sketches and final touches were done in Krita.