My aircraft thumbnail sketches were created with the aim to sort out composition. The aircraft I’d chosen to draw was quite small in size so I felt like certain angles wouldn’t show much interesting aspects to the plane and the composition overall could look quite empty so I chose a fairly standard perspective to create the final render from. It’s simple but I felt it worked best for this particular aircraft- if in future I do a more complex aircraft I feel a more abstract perspective could do it better justice.
Getting the correct tonal values
were a bit of a challenge because some portions of the aircraft were very dark
whereas some were very light. Also, a large majority of the aircraft was shiny
metallic so conveying that material type without going too dark in areas was a
bit of a task. I started rendering from the darkest areas like the nose of the
aircraft and then went back and darkened it throughout rendering if I felt some
part needed to be darker to show more contrast. It was a back and forth balance
of keeping the darkest darks strong enough to hold contrast against the rest of
the aircraft but not too dark that it looked flat.