Photoshop Tutorial - Stag Beetle/Post Box

In today's tutorial we were focusing on  production art and were tasked with creating a form/structure from an object and and animal that we (literally) picked out a hat (box). I got a post box and Stag Beetle, so first step was research - see below my collected reference images. 

The second step was to start thumbnailing our ideas, so below are very quick thumbnail sketches of a few designs. 

In design #1, I thought the double wing of the beetle was a good feature to use for the 'door' of a free-standing 'English' postbox based structure.

Design #2 is based on the typical 'American style' house mailbox, with the wings being able to be flipped up to show the mailbox has items in it. This is my favourite design. 

Design #3 is based off of wall mounted mail boxes some houses have instead of letterboxes through front doors, the inner wings form the basket and the outer wings form the protective case, which open outwards and you reach into the inner basket to retrieve letters, with the antlers for decoration, as with he other designs.

Designs #4 and #5 stem from #3 but are more of a rounded/3D basket design than the more 2D wall mounted one. Both sets of wings open outwards, letting the enclosed letters fall out the bottom to be collected.

Photoshop Digital Painting Tutorial #2 - Word Stacks, Abstract Thumbnails, Lasso Tool

These Photoshop exercises were designed to get us to relax a little about thumbnails and show us that there doesn't always have to be a definite idea of what you are creating/drawing, and that ideas can be generated from abstract shapes and brush strokes. 

Firstly we were directed to create a "word stack", a continuous stream of conciousness in writing form of descriptions and ideas and links made in your mind about a chosen city, which is a great way of getting everything in your head down on paper quickly, which then acts as a great resource for planning and developing your work. Initially I chose to create a word stack of Esmeralda, because I was interested in the city and had not yet developed any thumbnails for it, but then decided to also do one for Baucis as this is my chosen city, but due to the open-ness of the description of the city itself I am taking on board inspiration from other cities I like, especially Esmeralda. 

Then we were given a thumbnail template in photoshop and directed to create abstract compositions from our word stack (stacks in my case) using only the brush tool. 

Next we were given the same task but using the lasso tool and polygonal lasso tool.

Lastly, we combined different abstract thumbnails through different layering techniques to see what might emerge from the abstractions.

Photoshop Digital Painting Tutorial #1 - First Ever Digital Paintings

Today was my first digital painting class, using my Wacom tablet and photoshop. We were given approximately 20 minutes for each study, working on the black and white image first. Considering I'd never used the software or even a tablet before I am quite proud of the results; it definitely could have gone a lot worse.