Material study 1- Leather and buckle

Sketch

Since the idea was simple I roughed out a generic sketch of a torn belt buckle and moved on and although I am happy with this sketch I think seeing a few more variations would be nice in hindsight,

Tonal 

After sketching i moved on to tonal , my main concern here was getting the shades down , texture details I added in later. I think my favourite part of this tonal painting is the edges on the leather as I used edge highlights to make them more distinctive next to the shadowed side.

I think re assessing the shape would be my main improvement for this piece as the bottom half of the leather is a bit skewed. I would also add stitching along the outside of the leather as belts normally have stitching which I forgot to include in my work. The strongest part of the piece is definitely the buckle in my own opinion as the shading is done fairly well and the edge highlighting makes it look more metallic and differences it from the leather .

Colour

Colour was added using a gradient map and I decided to go for a classic brown leather and copper buckle as it fit the more rustic theme I had for the inventory. I also applied more texture painting to give the leather the skin-like texture since leather is just treated cow skin essential, this worked well and made the piece look more realistic overall. I added some small bits of rust around the metal buckle to make it look more worn but this could have been paired with some marks and scratches on the surface to really push the realism further.

Overall I think smaller details such as scratches in the metal  and the shape of the bottom half of the leather could be improved ad it would make the piece seem more developed and realistic but in general I do think that it turned out pretty well in the end and perticually like the way the metal was shaded with consideration for the reflectivity of the metal and the rust details, also the skin texture on the leather which I think makes it look more believable to the viewer.