Tripod Designs

For my starting point, I went to the library with the intentions of finding a books and references about insects and sea life. The reasons I chose those as to start myself off is because I always find sea creatures and insects very eerier and skin crawly as well as being down right bizarre!

With my first few designs I wanted a rather bug mechanical look to it with some hairs protruding from it because I personally find the hairs of insects to be very brrrrr! Sends my body into a shiver! After a few thumbs on these, I decided that it just really wasn’t working. I really didn’t like how immobile it seems and it didn’t look very out of this world.

I decided to maybe make it look more balanced, so I started designing with a more balanced look for the top. I wanted to not overkill the design with details too so I tried to keep it to a minimum on certain places. At this point, I tried to keep it a little similar to the war of the worlds description as well as trying to add in the elements of sea creatures of insects.

I was a little inspired by the jelly fish to add a wavy cloak layer with the idea of concealing everything underneath the tripod, so that the tentacles can reach out from underneath, snatching out the victims and taking them into the unknown. I played around with this idea but it really wasn’t getting me anywhere so I passed on that plan altogether.

I kept the sort of shape I wanted to the jellyfish look for the head and wanted to add the flies eyes pilot den on the top where the alien pilot resides and takes control. I designed my final tripod design with the idea of the tripod actually being a living mount.

The robotic parts, face mask and the reins on its front legs is to show that it’s being controlled by a master and isn’t in full control of its actions. The third leg (which is actually its tail) was to show the alien creature’s organic side and to not have it completely machine like.

For the final I went into greyscale with a tint of colour to add to the mood. As I haven’t really made a scene of some kind before I wanted to experiment with what I could do with the painting. I wanted to have the tripod climbing onto the top of sky scrapers to show how big it is, placing the horizon line below the middle of the page.

I faded the background to and added another tripod about to attack a helicopter, leaving it in suspense for the viewers to imagine themselves (as well as something for them to find if they look closer). I added in quite a bit of smoke to show a bit of chaos happening in the within the universe of the image.

I put in the fighter jets to show scale of the tripods as well as having a slight foreground element to show distance and space. I didn’t want to take the focus away from the tripod so I made the jet a little grey rather than the darker shade to show it’s on the foreground.

The skyscrapers were to have a kind of line to guide the viewer’s eye to the tripods.

 I was thinking of adding more detail onto the skyscraper’s roofs such as antennae and satellite dishes but I didn’t want too much getting in the way of the tripods legs.

At the end experimented with adding some red lights to the eyes of the tripods. This was mainly because I wanted a slight glimmer from the background tripods eyes to make it seem more menacing. I couldn’t exactly get the right look to it as the one glimmer I wanted was one of which you would get from the sun (the circle glimmer you get from the sun shining onto your camera lens for example).

It turned out to be a really fun experimental piece and I didn’t think I did too bad for my first time really thinking about a scene like this. I think I’ll definitely have to add more detail in certain parts (didn’t want to overkill the image and taking the focus away from the main subject of the final) and I think I’ll try it with full on colour at some point!