Planning and concepting

In this post I intend to talk about planning and concepting, so I figured out that the best way to tackle this subject would be to describe what steps I went through whilst creating this vehicle for 2nd year visual design project.

But first let me talk a bit about how I have learnt to plan my designs properly. I believe that this was (in terms of visual design) one of the most important things that I was taught on this course, and also one of the things that had the biggest impact on quality of my works. Sure, things like good lines quality, value separation, and using right colours are important too but these are things that I've been improving by practice whereas planning is more about mind setting.   

Before university and for the most of the first year I was not planning my projects at all. When given a task I would sit and draw whatever was in my mind without doing research and often even without preparation sketches. I guess that it was caused by the fact that I didn't fully understand the purpose of these preparations. I used to think that artists do research and preparation sketches only to come up with ideas, but I already had plenty of ideas in my head, so I thought I didn't need this. I was so wrong...

Now I know that these first stages are crucial and I would even say that they are the most important as they have a great impact on quality of the final outcome. It's just like with cooking - you can't make a good dish without preparation, just by throwing all ingredients to one pot, stirring and hoping that something edible will come out of it. Actually, it's like that with every creative process. You can't create something nice without preparation and planning. Also if you're planning ahead it can help you prevent many mistakes and save some time that you would spend on trying to fix that mistakes. 

So now I'll talk a bit about planning process behind this vehicle. It was created for 2nd year visual design project. The task was to create a mean of transport that can traverse through water, air and land. First of all I started with a research. I wanted to check if there are any real world vehicles that can function in all these environments. That's how I found about flying hovercrafts and I decided that it was a good starting point for my design. Although, I didn't want to simply draw something that already existed in our world, so I decided to turn flying hovercraft into a racing vehicle! So, I started with gathering some photos of both hovercrafts and sport cars and composing them into this mood board.

Even though you can't see it on this picture, at this stage I did small research on how real world hovercrafts work to make my design more believable. Putting photos of all these vehicles against each other helped me to clarify which way I should take this design. Next, with pen and paper I created these small sketches. It allowed me to explore different possibilities and gave me some options to choose from.   

Now that I had pretty clear idea where I wanted to take this concept, I did a few experimentations with shapes in Photoshop.   

And now I was ready to create this final picture. Later on, when I decided to magnify even more the fact that it's a racing vehicle I created the version below, which shows a bit of an inside. It was also based on a real world racing vehicles' interiors. 

I hope this post helped to show the importance of planning and preparing.