So! Doug Chiang... yeah I picked up his book called Mechanika at Chapters the other day, practiced a few of his works, then tried to come up with my own with the book by my side. I was surprised with what I did come up with. I've gotta be honest that I'm not mechanically minded at all, in fact I loathed the very idea of trying to come up with spaceship designs. I was even asking Dan WHY ARE YOU INTERESTED IN THIS STUFF!!? I've always found it too hard to come up with anything that looked good enough.
Just today I proved myself wrong.
Doug Chiang's book on drawing mechanical beings and spaceships really forced me to look on the fun side of all this. He uses a simple yet striking technique that makes the whole process of concept to finished art fun as hell. My concepts are not exactly where I want them to be yet, but I was very happy that I could draw something that looked good.
So the steps for getting from a small concept to totally awesome art according to Chiang (and I decided to change it up a bit too!):
1. Try to draw your earliest concepts on post-it notes. This seems silly but really works. Even when I try to just draw small images on a large piece of paper, I feel inclined to draw those tiny concepts bigger and bigger and BIGGER for some reason. Try the post-it note thing because with what Chiang explained in the book, it forces you to think in the main shapes rather than the details.
2. When you've come up with something you like, switch to a bigger, but not your final, piece of paper. Start with your blue pencil as it's more forgiving when you're experimenting with shapes. You are NOT focusing on the details yet, you're still focusing on the large shapes, but you're further exploring what can be done with the shapes. Try to "eye" what feels best as far as proportions go.
3. Now that you have a sturdy concept, switch to your final paper. Try to find/use the tools he lists, I've experimented with a different brand of marker because I happened to have them kicking around from first year graphic design. I'm using a very light (20 or 30 percent) Letraset cool grey for the base guidelines which will become part of the final drawing.
4. Use a darker tone of grey to start finalizing the guide drawing and to work in some more guides for the finicky detailed shapes. I found the more you use and experiment with your grey markers, the more thought out and amazing the final piece will look!
5. (For the non-mechanically minded) Here is where you want to start listening to some good music. Take your .05 fine tipped Staedtler marker and start bullshi*ing final shapes based on those grey guides you drew. Again, I've got to be honest, I did have the book beside me, but it gave he a good hand in coming up with my own mechanical structures that looked like they would work in real life.
There was a lot more Chiang explained in the book that I found very interesting. He went on about using these toy model cars and other mechanical things as reference for his creations. He also explained that not finishing the drawing (like I did below) is good for letting the viewer fill in the blanks.... I'm not going to get into all of it because I'm really supposed to be talking about Dan's game.
But yeah, I had fun.
Post-it note sketches, they really work!
This guy was inspired by a Stremeline Moderne/Art Deco lamp of all things!
Final Rendering
