Traditional Art

Week 9 - Final Piece

Thumbnail sketch of the composition focusing on value not line. In the final piece I am aware that the creases in the backdrop will be much less prominent as I want the main contrast to be on the objects themselves.

My rough sketch mapping out the objects. At this point I knew I needed to adjust the book placement slightly to closer match the thumbnail to avoid it kissing against the edge of the glass.

II started by placing the basic values on the notebook and the glass to get an idea of the gamut for this piece.

rendered the skull in the same way I did in week 7. The scale was reduced this week so I also reduced how much of the tertiary surface detail I rendered.

For the drapery backdrop I knew it needed to be low contrast compared to the objects within the composition, so I tried to make the creases and folds as subtle as possible initially. However, this lead to it looking very line-y so I decided to try and very lightly add some gradation without making it too dark overall.

The final piece

I think this piece is successful compositionally but in terms of the rendering it looks rushed. This is because it was rushed. Although the outcome is disappointing I have learned that next time I need to pay more attention to the overall piece from the beginning rather than splitting it up and doing it in sections. I need to treat a still life composition like this as a whole not just a sum of its parts.

I think the skull turned out very well, likely because it was fun and engaging to draw and I had practiced in week 7. The notebook was particularly challenging to render just because it's so dark. I think the flowers have been rendered reasonably well but they are getting lost, and blending into the background. I don't think the solution here is to increase the contrast with the background because there is already a reasonable difference in tone, so I think maybe a cleaner outline would help. I've moved away from clean outlines especially in regards to more organic forms but I think this is one example where they would still prove beneficial to the final outcome.

Reflecting on Term 1

I think the best thing I learned this term was that I enjoy drawing a lot more when there's no lines. Building up tone feels a lot more natural and as someone who has really struggled with controlling the pencil I find it a lot quicker and easier to refine rough shading than producing a clean outline. My overall goal for this year was to start taking more artistic license in my pieces instead of adhering rigidly to what I percieved was the "correct" way to draw or render something. Leaning more into cross hatching has definitely made this easier and I think pieces like the Week 1 line drawing have shown me that I can be creative without sacrificing communicating the objects I'm drawing. I believe my skills have developed a lot more than the final piece would imply. The biggest indicator of this for me is the apocalypse piece. Last year I did my self portrait in the same mediums but the difference in confidence and trusting in the process has led to a much more visually impactful outcome. For next term I really want to focus on staying on track because there will be a lot of portraits and life drawing from models and I don't want to have any pieces looking rushed and poorly rendered.

Week 8 - Human Head Construction Part 2

Thumbnail sketch

This week's task was to create a drawing of the plaster head using no lines - only tone and shading. I thought this way of drawing would come really naturally to me because it's more reminiscent of painting. Plus, the sketching process takes far too long to see realistic results for my liking so I think this will give me more immediate visual feedback in terms of what I may need to fix in terms of proportion.

I started with the eye as it is a contained area and will determine the proportion of the rest of the face.

I continued shading in tone on the face but something about the proportions felt significantly skewed. It didnt look like the face of the model.

After feedback I realised my error in placing the eye too high, causing the top of the head to start creeping off the page. As a result I decided to start again because now I knew what I was doing this next iteration would be a lot more efficient.

I got to this point in about half the time it took me in the original. I started placing some of the smaller shadows around the nose and mouth. which really helped

I am willing to admit this background method was a terrible mistake but at the time I didn't know better. The incredibly high contrast draws away from the focal point of the face and makes the whole thing look flat.

This version of the background is much more effective and complements the gamut of the piece much more effectively. I'm definitely glad I restarted as I think this version has much better proportions.

Overall I think this piece made me realise how I like to draw and that is initially with total abandon and then worrying about fixing it later. I think trying to perfect a sketch or outline has been holding me back in terms of speed and efficiency as I really like this method more. It won't always be appropriate but for softer forms like faces I think it will be very useful.

Week 7 - Human Head Construction Part 1

Rough sketch - It is very hard to nail down proportions with outlines as everything will shrink once I start shading.

I immediately started placing down tone to help figure out the proportions. The hardest part was the shape of the eyes because unlike the nose they don't really have any hard defining lines or sharp edges, the bone is a single piece that curnes around the form.

I continued building the tone and added the tertiary detail. I think tertiary detail like the small shading anomalies on the back of the skull are key for communicating the roughness of the bone material because without them it was looking very plastic-y.

The final piece. While the skull is central in the composition I think it could do with some more breathing room off to the right in line with the gazing direction. Alternatively shortening the shadow might achieve the same effect. I think the overall quality of the drawing is successful and the proportions seem accurate.

Week 6 - Apocalypse Environment

Research:

I thought that the texures on this abandoned machinery were interesting but the overall composition of the image proved to be too weak to create my final piece based off.

Abandoned theme parks are a common trope for a reason (they're creepy AND fun) but this composition lacked depth as it really is just the ferris wheel. I tried moving the ticket booth further away but it still felt flat overall.

This was my favourite image by far but realistically I did not have time to render this to it's full potential before the deadline. I really like the composition and the atmosphere created by the washed out browns but I had to abandon this one.

This last image is just of the abandonned shed attatched to my parents house. I think it is fairly apocalyptic looking and I felt like sketching something closer to home so I decided I would at least try this out in a thumbnail. The main drawback is that it's in portrait format rather than landscape, which isn't a complete dealbreaker but it does change the read of the piece compared to other environments.

Thumbnailing:

None of these thumbnails stood out to me as successful, so rather than try and force one of them to work I decided to go back to our task and look at some of the new inspirational photographs that had been uploaded and create a thumbnail based on that.

I chose this image to try and develop.

This composition felt much more cohesive and I was more confident that I could render this in colour before the deadline. My plan was to do a basic wash in water colour to save on time and then build up tone and texture using my coloured pencils. I have learned from last year that it is going to look soul-crushingly awful to start with but eventually it will seem almost passable!

The drawback of using colour pencils is that getting the exact tones becomes much more challenging, so I think I will have to approach this from a less precise angle and try to capture the value and intensity of each area rather than the exact colour. In addition to this, the initial image is quite dark overall which is something that might be challenging to recreate in my chosen medium so I will have to be aware of that as I work as well.

Watercolour & colour pencil:

My initial base in water colour. I wanted to get the rough colours down and give an indication of value

I decided to start with the curtains as they were a small contained area that I could warm up with. After this Imoved onto the bricks. I was conscious of starting off lightly because I can always make it darker later, but removing tone may be more challenging than with graphite.

I continued building up tone and texture in small sections. At this point I was choosing to render aspects in a rough order of how prominent I thought they were in the composition just so I could keep track of how the overall piece was feeling.

I left rendering the bed and floor until last as they are in the foreground and I wanted to make sure the background was successful first before rendering the rest. The original bedspread is patterned but I think trying to recreate that in pencil will just create unnecessary visual noise so I decided to just render the overall forms with plain blue.

The finished piece

I think I like this piece. That sentence is not particularly useful in terms of analytical reflection but sometimes I just need to appreciate the outcome for a minute before picking it apart.

I think I chose the right medium for this piece. I was tempted to use just watercolour or acrylics but I think the watercolour would have lacked contrast and the acrylic would have lacked the roughness that the texture of coloured pencil can bring. I would have liked to have pressed a bit harder to smooth out some of the darker tones but this is something I know I have struggled with repeatedly this term.

I think the colour choices were successful

Week 5 - Developing the Victorian Architecture piece

My initial rough sketch of the shopfront. I keep having the same issue where the right hand side of my drawings start creeping up the page whether it be straight lines or ellipses so that is something I am going to have to fix before rendering anything further. I also noted that I need to adjust the position of the street light as it feels like it's floating behind the store like some kind of ghost.

After adjusting the angle of the lines, particularly on the shop sign and having refined the lamppost I decided it was worth beginning to render as no matter how meticulous my outline was I would have to fix stuff later anyway. It definitely looks a lot less distorted than it did before. I think I will need to adjust the placement of the second streetlamp to be in line with the original one.

I placed down a base tone for the brick wall. The initial image had a white wall but I wanted a more red-brick material so I ended up using a separate reference image just for this section.

Rendering the brick wall.

I decided to go for a cobbled floor which again required a different reference. I think the floor looks slightly distorted unfortunately although I'm not entirely sure why. I think it may be due to the rough lines of the cobbles not matching the perspective - they more closely match the slanted wooden floor than the flat panels above.

For the sake of atmosphere I decided to set this scene at night. The temptation to draw an incredibly dark night sky was not going to work out well so I decided to do a lighter hatched background and then illuminate around the street lights to give a kind of illusion of darkness while still making the overall scene relatively light.

The finished piece

I think the biggest flaw of this piece is that it does look a bit like the shop is hovering in a void. I think it may have benefited from some kind of railing or pathway off to the left hand sidem just to imply that there is a path which continues further down a street and not just one isolated building.

I ended up deciding not to render the inside of the shop for two reasons: the first one being time. Logically as well if it is night and the inside of the shop is dark an observer wouldn't be able to see through the reflections on the surface of the glass anyway so I think it would have looked strange and disjointed to include an interior.

I think next time I would also use a ruler to render the bricks. There is definitly some distortion happening towards the edge where the brick lines start curving a bit which just detracts from the overall structure of the piece.

Week 4 - Victorian Architecture

This week included a trip to the (locally) famous Abbey Pumping Station for us to gather reference for a Victorian Architecture piece, with a focus on mood, atmosphere and lighting. Below I have included some of my favourite photos from the day along with the thumbnails I sketched on site.

Gallery & Analysis:

I know from last year that I do like just drawing buildings but realistically a building is not the kind of self-contained narrative environment this week's task is looking for, so I decided against this image.

This image has lots of cool and interesting features but personally I think that the lighting is atrocious and I wouldn't enjoy spending excessive amounts of time figuring out how to improve it enough to make it my final piece.

I liked this image for the interest created by the different levels, but having the main focus of my image be a door didn't seem interesting enough. I could have had the door opening slightly ajar which would have added some narrative interest but the overall composition is still lacking.

This image had a nice composition but again it didn't feel like it was an interesting environment.

I loved the colours in this image but the perspective was very flat and limited. Plus I am planning to render in graphite pencil so colour is irrelevant to me.

I found this environment really interesting. I liked the contrast of the clean clothes against the rough brick wall and there are plenty of narrative elements to work with.

This was my favourite image. Initially I wrote it off as it wasn't possible to fit the entire scene in one image but I realised I do infact posess a brain and I can actually use it to extrapolate some visual information once in a while. As a result I decided to go with this image, but I was advised to change the white bricks to a normal red brick to avoid having large swathes of negative space.

These were my initial thumbnails. I only managed to create three of them on site and the rest I drew from the images I took while at the museum.

I made multiple attempts at getting the external building to feel like an environment but it just wasn't the right fit for this project piece so I decided to move on. I did like the living room scene (which I didn't even take a photo of) but I think the perspective was so intense where I was looking down onto it that it felt too cramped for the atmosphere I was intending to create. I wanted to make something dark but wistful - I did not want to include any reference to victorian serial killers because I personally am not a fan of the direct artistic romanticisation of any kind of true crime.

I think this is definitely the best choice of environment I could have made. I can play around with the lighting in the background around the streetlight to add atmosphere without changing the focal point of the shop itself. The only thing I might also alter is the clarity of the objects in the shop window because if it is dark inside and the street is lit outside it would be difficult to see into the room from the pavement.

Week 3 - Materials and Surface Properties

This was the setup I chose for this task, purely because I liked the glass bottle and knew it would be a challenge to draw. Last year I struggled drawing bottles that were tipped over at an angle because of the foreshortening so I know this is something worth practising.

Using hatching to build up tone and the correct form. I think I still have a habit of making the hatching lines too long because it's faster to fill in a larger surface. It does end up looking a lot messier this way though so I think I need to work on refining those lines as the tone develops.

For the metal vase I focused on trying to make my hatching neater and I think I achieved this. I remember from last year that the key to rendering metal is to start with the basic form, especially the core shadow, and then render in the highlights and reflections after that as they sit on the surface.

The finished piece.

Rendering the glass was a unique challenge. Normally I don't draw in a background for these kinds of pieces but for this one I decided that iw would be worth the extra time so that there was something to show through the glass. The cast shadow of the glass was also interesting to draw because in some areas it highlights the surface and in others it casts a more typical dark area.

I really enjoy studying optics and the behaviour of light so drawing the end of the metal refracted in the glass bottle was especially fun. In my original reference photo the placement of the objects was slightly different so I had to adapt the way I drew what was shown behind the glass. This is especially apparent in the glass jug where the entire object behind it wasn't included as it was in another set up, so I had to account for that in the final render.

Week 2 - Shape and Pattern

Basic sketch. I had some issues with symmetry on the jug and kettle again, especially on the handle.

For the clam shell I started by hatching in the basic form and adding the core shadow before trying to add the surface texture.

Rendering the metal was interesting. I started with the basic form again in cluding the core shadow and then used my putty eraser to bring out the highlights.

Rendering the patterend jug in stages. I made sure to mark out the sections of pattern and make sure that they deformed more as the jug curves away from the viewer.

The finished piece. I think it might benefit from extending the background up higher but this is something I won't prioritise until I finished all the other pieces.

Week 1 - Drawing with Lines

There wasn't a requirement to write about this weeks piece but I really enjoyed it and found it helpful so I have decided to analyse it anyway. This piece was used as a warm up for the beginning of year 2 and involved using none of our previously learned shading techniques and instead using only lines to convey the form, tone and texture. I've never used a technique like this before so I decided to start by just drawing lines where I saw a strong change in tones or form; that way I could work in the extra detail after communicating the basic forms.

The composition I was working from

In my initial thumbnail sketches I added a leaf to balance out the composition of the flowers.

Rough blocking out of the forms - at this point I had issues with symmetry on the vase which I needed to fix and I decided to add in the orange to add something more to the far left side to help balance out the height of the flowers.

I used a hard outline for all of the shapes at this point which felt strange after spending so long trying to avoid harsh lines in my drawings. Once the outer forms were placed I could start focusing on the overall shapes.

After feedback I realised I needed to add more contrast to the shadows so I added more lines and tried to vary the line weight a bit more to imply darker areas. I also added some shading to the flower petals to help differentiate them better.

I started by placing the highlights and drawing in the outline of the core shadows on the fruits. For the glass vase I started in the same way but then drew a pattern which mimiced the reflections I could see. I used small scribbled circles for the broccoli head texture as this was the most visually dense area of the composition.

I think this piece was a good exercise in observation and analysis of forms beyond just rendering. I had to think about how to communicate form amd texture without drawing exactly what I saw which was a refreshing challenge.

The Impact of Traditional Art Aesthetics on Game Art

Analysing the impact of traditional art aesthetics on game art can be broken down into several very basic elements:

Shape
Colour
Lighting
Symbolism

Each of these aspects contribute to the overall mood and feeling an observer gets from a piece. Colour and shape psychology influence the way we feel about the piece based of innate and cultural meanings we draw from particular forms. Lighting can be used to draw focus by creating contrast. Symbolism in games for me tends to be very hit and miss. It's either so on the nose it's cringeworthy or so subtle it feels like a reach to even consider there was intention behind it. I think traditional symbolism is used less in big-budget games than it has been in traditional art because of a combination of factors. Historically, art was not created for a the mass audience that video games cater to today. Needing to account for cross-cultural meanings likely has a big impact as unlike colour and shape, symbolism can vary wildly between regions. For example, the thumbs up is seen as positive and affirmative symbol in the UK but in some areas of Italy and Greece it's considered rude. In addition the red cross is recognised internationally as a humanitarian symbol, however this isn't true in all countries. In many Arab countries, where the cross may not be so well received, the Red Crescent is used instead to convey the same meaning.

Unlike symbolism which draws from cultural knowledge, a lot of shape language seems to be consistent across the world. For example the famous Bouba/kiki effect showed that people will commonly associate the same sounds and shapes together regardless of their linguistic origin. There is constant debate over whether the perceived meaning of colours is innate or learned as there are many conflicting studies, but cultures do differ in their perceptions of colours around the world. I think colour interpretation is a lot more personal than shape - most people I know have different favourite colours but I don't think anybody has ever asked me what my favourite shape is. If you're curious, my favourite shape is a triangle in 2D or an icosahedron in 3D.

Analysing Mass Effect 3 concept art by Matt Rhodes:

Highlighting the grouping of characters to show how it influences the narrative. Even without context this scene has been framed as a disagreement between two sides just based on this arrangement.

The contrast in shape language between sharp verticals and smooth arcs contributes to the futuristic and alien feel. Typically in traditional art built environments contain harsh lines and organic forms are soft - this combination in explored thoroughly in the game with the concept of synthesis between organic life and artificial technology.

Image source: https://www.mattrhodesart.com/mass-effect

This piece is all about contrast - the clearest example of this is in the warm/cool colour scheme. The cool bright floor lighting stands out against the red hot hologram, pushing it forwards in the scene. This is particularly interesting as holograms are stereotypically presented as light blue in sci-fi, so choosing to use red is purposely drawing on the historical meaning of red as the colour of danger instead of the trope of science stuff being cool toned - therefore the emphasis here is on the danger this represents not the futuristic technology itself, implying this tech is commonplace. Colour psychology theorizes that the meaning of red as dangerous extends across cultural borders because red is the colour of blood and it is typically associated with injury and death. In addition, red stands out in contrast to green and blue, the colours most commonly seen in nature, another reason why it can be such an effective warning colour.

If you were looking at this scene as an outsider I think it would still be easy to infer that this scene is taking place on a spaceship, where two groups are having a disagreement over some kind of dangerous entity highlighted in red.

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