MODULE ONE: HOW TO DRAW A CROISSANT
Completing Module One has taught me a multitude of technical skills in both manual and digital realms. They have improved both the quality of my drawing skills and efficiency in refining images; via editing and compositional layout.
PHOTOGRAPHS AND SCANS
Photographing the croissants provided preliminary issues that were easily fixed by purchasing a new croissant. The original croissant chosen was of low quality and lacked the glossy, bakery appearance that provided a larger amount of contrast and better overall appearance in the later drawing stages. I learnt that by placing two light sources at a thirty and sixty-degree angle when setting up a photo studio, I was able to provide sufficient shadows while maintaining high contrast and texture. Though taking photographs with my phone camera did an appropriate job at capturing the lighting and textural details of the croissant, I found that using a higher quality camera proved to be a better choice as it had a higher resolution and more professional photographic adjustments available. I experimented with both a Nikon D600 and FujiFilm X100s and ultimately chose the photographs taken on the FujiFilm as the resolution was higher than that of the Nikon. I also experimented with the angles at which the photographs were taken and quickly realised that taking shots from two cm below the table surface made a better elevation photograph than placing the camera directly on the table's surface.
RENDERING
When drawing the elevations of the croissant, I learnt that it was integral that the tip of my pencil was kept sharp to maintain textural details when shading. Having a blunt pencil made it easy to shade the general form and lighting of the croissant, but a finer tipped pencil allowed me to add pressure to the paper and achieve higher contrast and sharper, textural details. This process was also mimicked with the plan which was illustrated with a 0.1mm fineliner. For the general shape of the plan, I used textural lines that ran vertically to the page and large areas of light cross-hatching to establish basic areas tone before overlaying more concentrated and condensed smaller lines that provided further contrast.
When drawing the sections of the croissant I found that employing digital methods to assist my manual processes allowed me to complete the task with more efficiency. I edited the scanned sections by inverting the colours and further changing the image to black and white so that while drawing the sections manually, I was able to mimic the shadows and dark outline quickly.
AXONOMETRIC DRAWING
When constructing the axonometric abstraction of the croissant, I used photocopies of my manually illustrated plan to define a horizontal axis for the croissant which assisted with translating the plan to axonometric axes.
I used grid paper as a guideline beneath my section outlines to assist the construction of the scaled 10mm grid which minimalised the amount measuring and potential error made when constructing the grid.
When digitally manipulating the layout and composition of the page, I found it preferable to use Photoshop to Illustrator as Photoshop made it easy to edit and erase stray lines and scan marks while simultaneously completing the layout composition. I employed the ruler tool during this operation to assist with the alignment of annotations and visual components to maintain consistency and proper alignment of components as per conventions.