Designing A Vehicle..

I didn't think it was going to be easy, but it was still alot harder than I expected. This is really the first time I've tried to design anything for several years and as a vehicles its easily the most complicated thing Ive ever had to design.

I found this project quite difficult to get started on, I knew I wanted to do an air vehicle as I felt this had more possibilities but getting started with the shapes and ideas was really quite hard.
I tried to begin by drawing lots of shapes and movements lines and see what I came up with. Alot of them didn't really work out but some of them helped generate further ideas for where they could be going. I did near 70 initial shape ideas in total before I started to draw a little more complex ideas.

Examples of my simple shape ideas.

With the juices flowing a little more I was able to draw some more complex ideas that lended themselves much better to development and inspiration.

It was here I hit abit of an 'Xmas road block'. I found out just how tired I must have been and started to sleep masses. I found it very difficult to get back into work after not working at all for a few days and the project was starting to get more complicated which didn't make it easier.
But I did eventually manage to get back into the flow and picked some of my favourite designs so far and started trying to develop on them a little more. I picked 6 designs and did a page of sketches for each where I tried developing them further and get an idea of shape, perspective and style. This didn't go fantastic all the way, I found it very hard to put something I was designing into perspective. I found I didn't have a solid idea of what it looked like so my design would seem to change within the drawing and end up with the perspective wrong.

I was able to start narrowing down on a design that I liked and so developed that one further. I looked into variations of the shape with several different design ideas and also colouring of the vehicle.

I thought I had a good design flow going on with this vehicle but ended up changing the design quite alot towards the end. I'm not sure entirely what it was but something about this design just wasn't sitting well with me and I couldn't visualise it 3D properly and therefore couldn't draw it well enough.
So the design changed to something similar but something I could imagine better.

I did the same as before and explored differing designs, shapes and adding some colour to help visualise the idea. I also added some extra little details like vents and metal joints to add abit more realism to the vehicle.
After I was happy with the design I did a final image of it, which I painted in gouache paint instead of a digipaint. I haven't really painted traditionally before and I thought this would be a good opportunity to try it out.