This is my last sketch/render before I push my final rendering. At this point my surfacing is clear, direction of lighting, and perspective, yet, everything is still a little loose and expressive. I try to maintain the overall feel of the initial gesture sketch through the process.

I’m in the middle of writing up a big post for the site with some thoughts on the sketch process. In the mean time, I found this really cool article with some thoughts on sketching that speak dorectly to what I consider to be the heart and purpose of a sketch – communicating ideas.

Here’s a snippet from the post -

In truth, it doesn’t matter if you are good at sketching. The less formal the sketch, the better. In fact, avoid the urge to use a pencil as it leaves too much room for you to ponder, erase, re-draw, second-guess…

Click the link below to see more from the original post!

Sketch, sketch, sketch – 52 Weeks of UX.

Our friend Michael DiTullo has a busy schedule as Creative Director working at Converse. He has found some time however to throw together a nice little compilation of sketches/ideology with the book Analog Dreams.

Here is an interesting excerpt from the writings of Mr. DiTullo:

“There is nothing like the potential in a fresh stack of blank paper. I see the paper and my hand starts to twitch with anticipation, my eye searches for a pen, and my brain automatically begins thinking about what objects in the room I might design differently. Anything is possible on a blank page. The unknown awaits and my imagination is my only limitation. If I mess the sketch up, another fresh sheet of paper is right underneath, begging to be drawn on.

What I love about sketching is how quickly an idea that exists only in my mind is transported into yours. A sketch is the most efficient form of visual language and it is universal. It is not surprising that the earliest records of human communications are paintings on cave walls. Our initial written languages were refined pictograms. We are hard wired to receive abstracted visual information.” Continue reading

In this edit I mainly revise in order to add detail. My ellipse skill is bad so I created tires in photoshop. I chose to condense my rear end design and buff up my back tires. I paid strong attention to blocking off all my surfaces to create a more tangible sketch.

Tangible sketches are great because the viewer gets a sense of thickness and weight.
Also line quality is huge for me, the more shapes and surfaces blocked off the easier the rendering job in the future. I rarely re-sketch an selected idea, once I have my starting sketch its all overlays from there out.

For me its good practice learning to focus and evolve one idea versus jumping around. As you can see the sketch is more refined and surfaces are clearly blocked over. From here I might go into a little color, Im pretty happy the way it looks.

From Josh Reed:

In this first stage of revisions I really needed to understand what’s going on surface wise. I sketch without the roll cage so I could work my perspective in right. The rear wrap around gave me problems so I played with the styling on that a little.

The middle sketch was a quick pencil sketch I flipped and reworked from the back of my first sketch. Flipping a sketch over is good because it shows imperfections in perspective. Flipping a sketch upside down shows how static a image is, gestural lines speak louder then traced lines.
Remember when you rework a sketch and opt to sketch over your original don’t tighten up, stay lose its “Ok” to mess up you can always rework a sketch over and over.

The bottom sketch I added my roll cage in and added a couple construction lines where I didn’t understand how the surfaces move. You can see my rear end isn’t figured out graphic wise but I did chop in some interior and wheel wells.

Note there are still problems yet to revise but in this stage I focused on body surfacing and overall perspective. Tomorrow I will follow up with a tighter sketch aimed towards rendering.

Hello Everyone! My name is Josh, I’m a Native Detroiter, and I’m currently enrolled at College for Creative Studies. I’m a  Industrial Design major focusing in product design. Even though I’m in product I have love for vehicle design and all things a like. My background before Industrial design is illustration and commercial arts. I like designing but I have a strong passion for illustration and advertising. I understand its more efficient to have a focus rather then cater to everything so industrial design is where I lay. My hope is to become a prominent interior car designer.

I think my design is influenced by illustration the most. I focus around sketching and inking in my early stages to cut rendering time and confusing surfaces. Some of my influences are Tomer Hanuka, Russ Mills(I just love his style), and Adam Haynes. Other influences I gathered over time from different animes (Evangelion, Gundam, etc). The use of color, material breaks, and functionality is very inspiring, and of course the neatly outline shapes and sections are easy to understand and read. Hopefully you will like my work in future post. Thank you.

This week I’m going to take a random sketch from my sketchbook and post it, throughout the week I’m going to revise and render my sketch and keep everyone updated with my progress. This is a healthy way to systematically get in the habit of a sketch process. A good sketch process is vital for conveying ideas and explaining a thought progression.

So here is my first sketch I cleaned it up in photoshop a bit. Lets just say its some sort off road bauhaus vehicle check in tomorrow for a update.

Here’s a round-up of sketches from this week on sketch-a-day.com. My favorite one to sketch were the headphones and gloves. Check out the larger images after the break.

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A couple weeks ago I posted a sketch rendering of a PC Box on sketch-a-day.com. Luckily, I had recorded video of the sketching and rendering process and finally got around to laying in some audio and talking about the process. I’ll warn you though, It’s a little quick – okay it’s alot quick – and I may have glossed over a few things as I tend to do when I work digitally, but feel free to watch it a few times if you’re lost or email me questions [at] idsketching [dot] com.

I’m using Adobe Photoshop CS4 and a Wacom Intuos 3 in the demo.

See the finished render after the break…

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Here’s a snapshot of sketch-a-day for the week of January 19 – 6 images or so. You’ll find cameras, a shoulder bag, staplers, and a motorcycle among other things. Check out the full sized images after the break.

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This video follows the quick sketch/ideation of a cell phone concept as it goes from a quick sketch to concept composition page in the matter of minutes! Check it out and see about taking some easy shortcuts to get to a final sketch presentation page.