18/05/2017
Thursady:
Evaluation:
I started off my creative practice wanting to create five portfolio-standard 2D environments based around five different themes. While I still created the five portfolio standard 2D environments, a lot changed in the direction of my project as a whole. I originally wanted to create environments which featured structures to tie the compositions together to create a cohesive project. However in the middle of the project I was not happy with the direction and outcomes that I was coming up with because it wasn’t a project that was close to my heart. I tried to make the project into a force for change by looking at advertising of poverty and how my work could be used to try and change that but it still didn’t light the fire for me. It wasn’t until I showed some work which was interesting me in a critique that I was asked “why don’t you do something like that?”. It made me think about what I truly enjoy and what I want to create to drive my project forward. I come from a fine art background and all work that I have made previously has been inspired by abstract artists or artists that use a lot of texture such as Fancis Bacon’s Head VI (1949).
I always thought that fine art or art history didn’t have a place in concept art or games design but when I was asked “why not make something like that?” it made me stop and think, okay how can I do that? What movements are there that I can be inspired by to create better work and that are more relevant to my work right now? That’s when I started to look at famous environment artists that painted the Americas in the 1800′s. I felt so inspired by their work, I love the textures that are in oil paintings, so that fulfilled that aspect that I was looking for, the colour palettes were beautiful and I can’t not mention their ability to render atmospheric lighting. So my project took a turn towards being more inspired by the works of the Luminist movement rather than including cities. I turned my project into a technical challenge by setting the goal to make five panoramic images instead of five 2D images because I felt that this would make up the difficulty I was loosing by not including the cities anymore. I also thought that it would be amazing to have these atmospheric environments that would be interactive, where the viewer could turn around and be within the environment, especially in an environment which was inspired by the Luminist movement.
After mentioning to Sharon about my passion for the Luminst, Tonalist and Romanticism art movements we started to discuss the idea of arriving at this new land that hasn’t been discovered and painting it in same way these art movements do. Especially for the Luminist art movement, America had just been discovered and the natural beauty of it was translated into the paintings we see today. This is why the sky is often glowing and the colours are vibrant but soft, because it is meant to suggest a Godly, holy land that was pure. I wanted to convey the same emotions in my work however I don’t feel I was able to do this until my very last piece “Hills”. In my other works such as “City and Mountains” and “Valley” the colours are too saturated and the sky is not atmospheric enough however I feel as though I had to create an image like that to understand, it’s not what I want in a piece. It is still finished to a high standard but it wasn’t what I was aiming for as an end goal. I also tried other methods to achieve an aged effect by turning the sky into a green/blue hue as in my “Canyon” piece, though I feel this works because it looks vintage and hazy, it does not achieve the same results that can be seen in Luminist works. This is because I added in the green as a tint instead of considering the global lighting and tones of warm and cool which the Luminist are famous for.
While I was trying to achieve a style of painting which drew inspiration from the Luminist’s I was also trying to overcome obstacles which I faced technically. I set myself the challenges of creating five panoramic images however I was trying every way to achieve a panoramic painting without sitting down and actually painting it and crafting it myself. I tried creating the distortion in Photoshop, I tried projecting it on the inside of a sphere, I tried running algorithms or even converting my image into an equirectangular projection. In the end I admitted defeat and sat down and got stuck in trying to create the equirectangular projection myself and I found my own workflow and now I can say that I can easily make a panoramic image. What I learnt from this is that it is important to get stuck in and learn something that you’re uncomfortable with because the more you do it, the more you will learn how to do it unconsciously.
I am also looking into moving forward with my project and being able to design environments in programs such as 3D Coat so that they can be viewed in VR. I have also taken a lot of inspiration from Noah Bradley's reference packs. I am aiming to take more high resolution photographs so that I can build my own reference bank to draw images from so that I do not have to rely on others references. I have also begun to engage with the art community more, posting my work on forums such as “Level Up!” and “Panopainting 360 VR” to gain feedback on my work as well as online sites such as RoundMe. I have also posted it on more professional sites such as Artstation and my LinkedIn profile so that my work is more accessible to those who want to view my work professionally. As I am learning to code at the moment I have not created a dedicated portfolio site because I want to code my own in the future so that I can show off my work as well as being able to say that I coded the website myself.
Alongside my project I have been engaging in other activities as I discovered a passion for UX and UI design. To push forward with the development of of my skills in that area I have successfully learnt how to code in HTML and CSS and I am now learning to code in jQuery. In the future I would also like to learn other languages such as JavaScript, Ruby, Python and possibly PHP. I have also looked into jobs both in games design and web design and have found that while jobs in game design do not call for a knowledge of coding, jobs outside of the industry do. I have also enrolled in another course called CS50 which is run by Harvard University as an online course. It is a course which aids in the introduction to computer science, which I felt would be helpful while I am learning to code. I have also looked into internships and junior careers at companies such as Splash Damage, Creative Assembly, Jagex and Rebellion and found jobs in my desired area which I have applied for.