Trip to Loughborough Train Station

As we arrived we weren’t really sure if it was the right place, the ticket man confirmed it for us and we somehow got in for free (walked in and he didn’t say anything!). Joe was kind enough to offer me and a few others a lift to the train station and all chipped in for petrol and parking. 

A good start to the day I thought, rinsing my way into the yard like that, however the day started off rather slow for me. The train station was a tough day to get myself into the mood of drawing. I was quite put off from my lack of skills to draw trains (or any vehicle for that matter) and focussed more on exploring the train yard. I was interesting to see the train engineers working on the trains and the whole mood within the building just changed from a rather tranquil, open space yard to a claustrophobic iron scented spark shed. A rather rude train engineer told my good friend to “F**k off” after he sat on something by accident :S.

After the sigh seeing and seeing everyone else getting on with their work as well as students from the Loughborough University cracking on, I started to get a little motivated. With this project, I really wanted to dip into a bit of digipainting and get into the flow of practicing it. So I took a lot of photos to take home and do digital thumb studies on them.

We went to get lunch at a fish and chip shop but was frantically looking for a cash point as a few of us could only pay by card (which the chippy owner didn’t accept D:). Our awesome Visual Design lecturer was kind enough to lend me £10 so I didn’t starve and could continue on with the day. I rreally didn’t want to accept it as I felt it was rude on my part to borrow money from my lecturer, but I also didn’t want to have that awkward moment where we both insisted for a long time! :D (Thanks Chris!)

After a nice lunch, awkward moment where I accidently dropped a jumbo sausage onto tomato sauce on the table and saying “I’ve eaten worse” and the owner heard me (whoops!) and watching James Farrell and James Teeple arm wrestle Michal Tshikaya, we decided to go back to the train yard to continue our work. The trains had moved and the day looked quite different from the morning. After taking the remaining photos we decided to head off home.

For my final I started off in greyscale as I was rather unconfident with jumping straight into colour. I was still very unfamiliar with Photoshop and felt that I needed to start off a little slow.

However it was actually taking much longer than I had thought and ended up half way through diving into colouring. Working in colour was actually not as hard as I thought it out to be. I really enjoyed working in colour and definitely brought more life to when it was greyscale. I was quite pleased with the outcome but feel that I now really have to work out my values within my paintings. This project was great for boosting my confidence with digipainting.