CGMA week 3

I have been taking the CGMA - Environment Design 1 course taught by
the awesome James Paick.
So far it has been awesome fun and with each week I am pretty sure I have been
improving both my skills and my workflow.

The general format of the class is a lecture and demo released each Wednesday.
At the end of the demo we are given the assignment for the week and are given
a week to submit. For this week (week 3 of 8) we were asked to submit one full
blown grayscale environment concept using the prompt, "Scale, Space". That was it. 
After the previous two weeks of just
practicing our fundamentals (value, lighting, perspective) in thumbnail form
it was good to test out the next level up in detailing.

I decided to do some development thumbnails beforehand:

I liked both A and B as did a others when asked for feedback but I eventually decided to go with B. As a side note, I also saw a new composition in A with a serendipitous sidewards look at it. I thought it was a more interesting viewpoint using the same composition and I'd be keen to develop it when I get some free time.

A couple of stages of development and one good crit check later set me straight as I had
started to go astray with the complexity of shapes as well as diverging quite
a bit from the original values. I also had to try a couple of different things
for the foreground that just didn't end up working. So after a couple of hours of banging away I scrapped them and went back to the original thumb and reworked up from there. It came together much quicker after that.

The "final" submitted value sketch. It ain't perfect and I was far from happy with it. James suggested lightening up the background values even though it is in space to get the ship to pop (agreed) and really paying attention to internal perspective angles within the ship (agreed)

The process really reinforced to me the fact that in art you have to be willing to dump hours of work and backtrack if it just isn't working out. It's quite easy to get stuck in the rut of doing something and as creatives artists can often be quite stubborn and we think it is ruthless to just keep bashing on with things in the hope it will come right. But sometimes being ruthless is more about being flexible and open to accepting when you're not getting anywhere. Doing this and breaking out of the rut is a hard but necessary thing to get comfortable doing...in both art and life.