Designs

I found beginning my castle difficult. It's not something I'd done before and laying one out is harder than I imagined. Well laying one out that looks aesthetically pleasing. Below is an initial design.

 

I started with a very generic fantasy castle, upon a hill with a spire etc. But designing it to look simple yet have build up areas was proving difficult. My main building ended up looking more like a church than a castle. Whilst this design was fun to draw and try out, it was proving impractical for me. 

The next design was one that I stuck to quite heavily

As you can see from this image and my final building, the two are very similar. This is the way I wanted it to be, because I layed it out like actual building blueprints (with a small thanks to my flatmates, both architecture), it made it much easier to model in a technical program such as Maya. 

The reason I chose to do a blueprint straight away is because I could play with lines on the go. It's slightly improvised, I had no previous designs. It's from a built up memory of things that I've already seen.
I have strayed quite far from my initial designs and research but I didn't mind so much, I found this process helpful in the way that I realised I have to stick to my limitations in a program such as Maya, of which I have no experience. It's certainly been a learning experience.