Apowers' Design School Journey

This week was kitchen goods, focusing again on material thickness, material indication, and of course proportion and perspective. Definitely a rough week as far as getting objects to look right.










Good work Aaron and great progress! It’d be great to see overlays using pencil, cool gray markers and some color touches, that could really pump up the sketches!

Nice stuff Aaron. I can tell the sketching is becoming second nature. Once you get skilled enough at sketching, you think less about the sketch and more about the idea, and really that is the goal. To become so fluent in visual communication that your mind is only focused on the concept.

Thanks Michael and Alejandro!

I’ll be mixing in some marker this week, the topic is power tools this week.

I’m definitely getting the hang of sketching, but like you said, looking at some of these sketches make me feel a bit silly. I showed these to one of my instructors and he started asking me how they work, and made me realize that I’ve completely neglected the ideas and uses of the products. This week I’m going to work on understanding how things work and implementing them into my sketches.

Thanks for the feedback!
A

Two weeks ago stuff:






This weeks sketches:

nice work Aaron!

Great stuff Aaron, amazing progress in this thread.

Thanks guys!

The past two weeks we have been doing some soft goods sketches and man am I having a tough time!

We had a sub come in from Samsung and he really didn’t like how much marker I was putting down on the page. Definitely something I’ve always struggled with.


Maker looks good, but I can see why we would say that. In the sketch phase, marker is just meant to add a bit of attention to an area. Like to show material if its important to the concept ( glossy vs matte areas etc). Or call out a touch point.

Your going full on render with the markers, which is OK, but prob not appropriate at the level on ideation your suppose to be delivering at.

Thanks Emmanuel, I definitely agree. With the way things are changing it seems like marker ‘renderings’ are a lot of calories spent that could be used in a more photo realistic way via CAD or other digital tools. In this case I think what really messed me up was that I wanted to show material colors rather than more grey marker value studies.

I was just going through your chair thread last night, I really enjoy the way you present your work!

Thanks for your time!

I think for softgoods I typically out a lot more market down and more in a matte style. You are rendering a soft material. Think about creating form more by doing solid fills of color and then darks and lights ontop of that. Also Ty to simulate texture, putting a piece of textured fabric under your sketch and rub the side of a white or back pencil over top. Take a look at the fabric parts of the shoe sketch I posted today.

Good luck and don’t worry about your sub :slight_smile:

Thanks, but you just reminded me that I re hosted my website, so i need to go back an relink all those photos tonight. :neutral_face:

That’s a great tip yo, first time I hear it. I have to try that!

Here’s some sketches from this week.

I really wanted to improve my marker technique this week and experiment with colors, style, and line weight. I think they are still a bit over-rendered, and my peers/instructor didn’t like the use of color again.

I also wanted to dive further than just grey marker sketches and see if I could communicate different materials through reflections in forms and smart use of value. I don’t think I succeeded in very many sketches but I can definitely see where I need to improve.

Strong showing. I think these are really getting there. Keep pushing, and keep experimenting.

Thanks Michael,

I suggested this week that we get into some real thinking and designing even though it’s a drawing class. So we are doing 3 categories with a full range of sketches from ideation/thinking thumbnails to some refined line sketches and some final drawings. We can choose any topic, hoping to have some more interesting stuff to look at soon!

Cool. Remember to find your own style. I tend to do a lot of more solid market fills and then work back in with white chalk and white pencil. It works for me. Observe others, experiment, and assimilate what you feel works for you.

Thanks Michael, I definitely need to develop a style.

I’m reworking all the projects in my portfolio at the moment so here’s some sketches, I really enjoy dancing from really rough sketches to nicer drawings.

Revisiting the marching band shoe. I wasn’t happy with the final aesthetics and think there is room to make the project much more finished:

Current state:

Some quick graphic explorations:




Also revisiting my trans 1 concept to fit in with my product design 2 shopping project for Amazon: Will post a thread on this project soon

Current state:

Proportion change, and integration of cargo units for shopping:


And lastly a drum pedal sketch that people really enjoyed in my drawing class:

That is the thing, none of us are ever happy with what we have done. Everything I post I feel the same way about… you are doing the right thing by revisiting those old projects. Your new marching band sketches are so much better and probably took you 1/4 of the time. It shows how much you have learned.

Here’s some stuff from winter break:

I really wanted to find some quick sketch techniques that found the balance between marker rendering and just linework… Some sketches are from reference.

And here’s some studies in digital from my digital sketching class:

and a quick 40 minute exercise from sketch to digital