"Good Kill"
For assignment 5's diptych(ish) I ultimately settled on the above, a nondescript friendly aircraft shooting down a Russian MiG-29 over a Ukrainian shoreline.
Before landing on this I was tossing around a few "action" ideas with a similar theme. The first idea was a nose-on view of a laser guided bomb on the rails of an aircraft in flight, with the paired image being the in-cockpit screen showing its cameras watching an armored vehicle. While thermal cameras are thankfully already black and white, I decided drawing all the little words and icons on a screen would have been quite a pain in the rear. Another idea was similarly a nose-on closeup of missile, with the dogfight in front of it reflected in its glass nose. Again, drawing a fish-eye reflection of a scene would have taken far too long to do well so I passed on that too.
The process was pretty straightforward. I put down light lineart as a guide, adjusted as needed, put in values for the primary objects, then did the backgrounds (land, sea, sky). After failing with a couple cheap brushes I landed on a nicer flat one that was more consistent in laying down charcoal powder for a smooth-ish background tone. The clouds and waves were primarily drawn with erasers.
The scales and values of various things really need some refinement (the BTR looks comically like a clown car size-wise next to that guy, and the MiG is way too close to the pursuer to make sense for a successful launch) but all in all I'm happy with what I put down and how efficient I was compared to previous drawings. I also wish I would have brought out the clouds a lot more, but it's tough to fully remove charcoal once it's down.
References were all over the place. The missile was an AIM-9X on a US F/A-18C wingtip, chosen simply because it looked cool from behind when I was looking around the web. The infantry started with that dorky kid with an AK from "Red Dawn" and eventually I ended up just taking a picture of myself with an old paintball vest to get the basic poses right. For basics like flares and clouds I looked at how other artists made those shapes, and for vehicles I either looked around online for photos, or loaded them up in flight sims to orbit around 3D models at will. I placed a few references below, but I'm sure there's a bunch I forgot about.
Before landing on this I was tossing around a few "action" ideas with a similar theme. The first idea was a nose-on view of a laser guided bomb on the rails of an aircraft in flight, with the paired image being the in-cockpit screen showing its cameras watching an armored vehicle. While thermal cameras are thankfully already black and white, I decided drawing all the little words and icons on a screen would have been quite a pain in the rear. Another idea was similarly a nose-on closeup of missile, with the dogfight in front of it reflected in its glass nose. Again, drawing a fish-eye reflection of a scene would have taken far too long to do well so I passed on that too.
The process was pretty straightforward. I put down light lineart as a guide, adjusted as needed, put in values for the primary objects, then did the backgrounds (land, sea, sky). After failing with a couple cheap brushes I landed on a nicer flat one that was more consistent in laying down charcoal powder for a smooth-ish background tone. The clouds and waves were primarily drawn with erasers.
The scales and values of various things really need some refinement (the BTR looks comically like a clown car size-wise next to that guy, and the MiG is way too close to the pursuer to make sense for a successful launch) but all in all I'm happy with what I put down and how efficient I was compared to previous drawings. I also wish I would have brought out the clouds a lot more, but it's tough to fully remove charcoal once it's down.
References were all over the place. The missile was an AIM-9X on a US F/A-18C wingtip, chosen simply because it looked cool from behind when I was looking around the web. The infantry started with that dorky kid with an AK from "Red Dawn" and eventually I ended up just taking a picture of myself with an old paintball vest to get the basic poses right. For basics like flares and clouds I looked at how other artists made those shapes, and for vehicles I either looked around online for photos, or loaded them up in flight sims to orbit around 3D models at will. I placed a few references below, but I'm sure there's a bunch I forgot about.