Digital Fine Art: Project 1

Project 1

Project Requirements

The main goal of Project one is quite open ended. I must create a work of art that could be (and hopefully will be!) displayed in an art gallery. Every stage of this project must be created entirely with digital means up until a physical copy is printed.

Concepts

I must admit, when a project is so open ended it can be very easy to get lost in all of the artistic freedom you are given. Because of this I forced myself to make as many definite decsions early on as I possibly could. Here are some things I decided upon before even beginning concept work.

• I am enamoured with the idea of doing a triptych with each part being a long thing rectangle shape. So this will be the setup of my project with the center piece being brighter and drawing support from the two outer pieces.
• My digital medium will be 3d. As always I want to put focus on lighting and shading in 3d but this time I am excited for the oppurtunity to be a bit more abstract and use more self expression.
• I will use a very dark background and soft vignetting to draw the eye in a way that I find sophisticated in art.
• I will keep my subject matter challenging yet do-able. I will be modelling everything entirely myself and because of that I don't want to get bogged down in too-complicated models.

Rough Concept Sketch

The concept I chose to move forward with is a triptych consisting of three (really just two) faces. The center face is that of an old woman and is lit warmly and intensely while the outer faces are two sides of the same younger feminine face that are dimmer than the center face. The faces are very stretched in a totem like way that brings about a sense of a tribal ritual.

Artist Statement:

The idea for this piece is to evoke a confrontational sense a cult-like mystery. The center figure represents a concentrated face of learned wisdom and even begins to evoke a sense of fear in the viewer. The outer faces are those of quite listeners. They represent curiousity, inmocence and youth. They are the faces of the students beginning to absorb knowledge from the mysterious exalted master. This piece displays a relationship between the face of blank slate young potential and the face of seemingly all-powerful accomplished expertise and examines the state of mind involved in learning in a quite ceremonial place within the mind.

Previsualization

Process 

 

At this stage I was trying out a degree of realism especially with the center face. I was sorting out my basic lighting and had not yet given much attention to the side faces.

 

 Here I was experimenting with bringing a more organic and less realistc aspect into the image by playing with mixing a woodgrain texture in with my painted skin texture for the side faces.

Here I am continuing to work with lighting and deciding how I feel about the integration of the wood texture.

 Here I have decided the side faces were detracting too much from the center so I cooled down and dimmed the lighting on them.

 This piece shows significant progress in my thought process. Here is where I decided that desaturation was absolutely the way to go! Desaturating helped to unify the faces and it helped me to focus more on values.

  I wanted to see if I could do something to artistically break up the outer edges of the faces. I messed around with displacements and ended up adding a render layer with a displacement much like the one on the right that I would later composite on top of the beauty render in photoshop.

 Finally as opposed to adding hair to the figures, which I felt would be visually detracting, I decided to add a few vines clinging to each of their faces. The right face is meant to be feminine so I added light delicate vines falling down from where hair might have been. For the male on the left I added dark, less flowery vines clinging to where a beard might be.

Final