Invisible Cities - Research

I completely forgot to upload this! Here is my research for Invisible Cities. As I'm more of a visual person, I decided to create small influence maps for each of the cities to enable me to explore them all.

Invisible Cities - Reflective Statement

I found the Invisible Cities project challenging but fun to do. I enjoyed picking a city and drawing out concepts for it. Although I struggled with making thumbnails, I think I've really improved my skills and for the next project it'll be a lot easier. Where I made thumbnails in very uniform boxes, I think it scared me a bit and gave me a lot of trouble when it came to trying to imagine up ideas. I realised, later on in the project when coming up with ideas for Zenobia, that if I didn't draw the boxes I felt a lot more free to come up with ideas, and it made it so much easier. It's amazing how such a tiny difference in my workflow has helped me enormously!

If there is one thing I could change about this project, it would be how I've managed my time. Going from a college course that didn't require any work at home and was only two days a week, to a full time uni course was a massive change for me and took some adjusting. At the beginning of the course, when we first got our brief, I wish I'd have gotten ahead with my work before the pressure really set in! Although I really regret leaving the work, I've definitely taken a lesson from this and will adjust how I work next time. This project was an eye-opener of what uni is like and it's definitely essential to put in more time compared to my old college course!

The main thing I enjoyed about the project was that I've never really done environments before, because I'm more of a character artist. I never had much confidence in doing environments as I've never actually practiced them, but once I got stuck in I realised it wasn't going to be as bad as I thought - it was actually very fun to do, in fact. This was the main thing that surprised me about the project, as I came in a bit apprehensive about how well I was going to do. I quite like my finished designs, and although they could do with a bit more detail, they are a good start to my first year. This is a good starting point for me to improve!

In conclusion I've really enjoyed the first project of uni. I'm excited to move onto the next one so I can take what I've learnt forwards with me.

Who's Who? - Oscar Gregeborn

I hope this is a suitable concept artist presentation. I couldn't actually find much about Oscar Gregeborn online, which isn't much of a surprise as he's still very young. I found his art so inspiring I had to research him: even if there wasn't much information to go on!

Invisible Cities - Process GIFs

Here are the three process GIFs for my Invisible Cities project.

Exterior Establishing Shot

Exterior Low Angle Shot

Interior Shot

Invisible Cities - Art Of

Invisible Cities - Critique

Invisible Cities - Zenobia Colour Keys

In Jordan's most recent class he set us the task of making main colour keys from our favourite thumbnail. I decided to work on a digital version of a design I came up during the lesson, which is this one:

I really like this design, and I wanted to try out doing it digitally and applying different colours, so this was the perfect opportunity. I was a bit apprehensive when I started in Photoshop, because although I love colour, I'm not very good at applying it myself. First, I started out by colouring the grass green, huts brown, e.t.c, but I realised that wasn't the right way to go about it. Instead, I decided to make everything greyscale to help me a bit. I really enjoyed it after that, and the picture progressed quickly. I was really amazed at how much simpler it was to understand light and shadow when just using greys, and when I finished I felt a lot more confident in my abilities. Here is my finished greyscale image.

It's still a little empty, it needs more platforms, houses, and I'd like to include some tall trees (with vines possibly) too. Now I'm working on just one city instead of trying to come up with ideas for all of them, I've had a lot more time to think about what I want Zenobia to look like. The main ideas I have floating about in my head at the moment is how the inhabitants will get around: my favourite thoughts have been that they use big kites to fly with, or slides! I also want to include a kind of food source in the city - how are they getting their food when up above the ground? I still have a lot to think about! Anyway, enough rambling, here's the colour keys I've developed from my greyscale image.

I think I learnt a lot more from colouring the greyscale Zenobia than from doing the new ones. Nevertheless, the colour keys aren't bad, even if they are a little plain. I want to work with more natural colours so I want to start focusing on browns and greens, with maybe some contrasting colours to make the city pop out a bit more. I'm still a bit new to gradient maps and colour keys so these ones aren't great, but at least they're a start. My next stage is to come up with some more solid designs and then continue to develop colour along with it. The deadline is looming and I feel like I still have so much to do! 😨

Invisible Cities - Zenobia Influence Maps

Here are the interior and exterior influence maps for Zenobia. I want to go with Chinese and Japanese architecture, but I've also pulled a few influences from Thai and Korean architecture too. For the interior of the houses I want it to look quite cluttered and home-like, and this wasn't really present in Japanese interior design, so I was glad to look at a few different influences to get the kind of feel I was looking for.

Invisible Cities - Zenobia

Over the weekend I have had a rethink over my Invisible Cities project. I've decided to go with Zenobia, and I've created a mind map of the key words from the text to help me come up with ideas:

I decided to do a mind map because I didn't want a repeat of Fedora, where I would go off the text and end up with a completely inaccurate city! Whilst I was doing this map, the idea struck me of Chinese/Japanese bamboo architecture, as those countries are known for growing bamboo. I also talked to Oliver about my ideas and he told me about a bayou in New Orleans, which is a kind of swamp. This could be an idea to use for the environment my city will be based in.

In my toolkit lesson yesterday with Jordan, we started to explore our cities a bit more, and I drew out a few more detailed ideas. I've numbered them to show which drawing I started with, and how it developed.

I like number three a lot, as it really describes how I want the outside of the city to look like. It incorporates this idea of Japanese and Chinese architecture, and uses bamboo as the main building material of the city. I'd like to develop this drawing digitally and see if there's anything else that I could add.

I also spent some time trying to work out some of the finer details that may be in the city, like the trees and the surrounding environment. I used locations in China as my inspiration for these drawings:

My next step will be to make an influence map, gathering all of the pictures I find fit with the city and putting them in one place. I'm really happy I've decided to change cities, as I'm liking the idea I've developed even more than my last one!

Invisible Cities - Thumbnails 35-58

Here are some more thumbnails for the Invisible Cities project. I've tried different ways of creating them here, as advised by Jordan in his class. I have used the lasso tool, the brush and collage to make a different variety of designs.

I have also settled on Fedora as my city, so I have created a few more drawings of how I think the city could look:

Invisible Cities - Thumbnails 8-34

I've continued making thumbnails for the Invisible Cities project throughout the week. I'm working hard on trying to develop some ideas, but I still need a bit of practice. To experiment, I've drawn some of the thumbnails in Photoshop, but honestly I didn't like that method much at all. If I do any thumbnails in Photoshop again, I don't think I'll do it in a line drawing format as it's just too messy and inaccurate. We explored some other methods of drawing thumbnails digitally in Jordan's class, which I'll be posting about soon. For now, here are all of the thumbs I have so far.

I have a bit of an interest in Fedora, where there is a different globe showing a different version of Fedora in every room. I've only done a few thumbnails for it so far but once I've done some basic designs for all of the cities, I'm going to go back and develop my favourites. I also like Baucis, just because I've had quite a few interesting ideas of what a city in the sky looks like! I'm looking forward to exploring these cities further in a week or so.

Contextual Studies

Today we had our first contexts lesson and I found it very interesting, so decided to do a quick blog about it. We were given the brief to write an 1000 word essay by December, which I think is very possible in that time frame. I would like to write my essay about post-modernism in film, but I don't have much development on this idea yet.

What really captivated me was when we had our first lecture, where we were helped to really look at different inspirations for our Invisible Cities brief. We were introduced to a few different ideas, and I've made a small list of things to consider when attempting my next thumbnails:

• Angles
• People - who lives there?
• Map
• Style of time period
• Does it tell a story?
• Level of detail
• Utopia or dystopia?

One subject that also really interested me was the concept of 'non-places'. This is a phrase used to describe a place where human beings remain anonymous and where they do not hold enough significance to people to be described as real places. For example, a bus stop or a supermarket could be described as a non-place. This is something I felt really drawn to, and I'd like to explore this further in my next thumbnails for Invisible Cities. I now feel a lot more inspired after this lesson, and I can't wait to get started on some more drawings. More to come soon!

Invisible Cities - Thumbnails 1-7

I've spent the last couple of days working on some thumbnails for my Invisible Cities project. I have started with Armilla and now moved onto Baucis, making a few different designs on what the two cities could look like. These are the first 7 thumbnails that I've drawn out.

I've never been a very good 'ideas person', but it's always something I've been desperate to improve at, so I hope these aren't too bad. I would absolutely love any advice on how you come up with ideas and get it down on paper. I always seem to have trouble with it which isn't very useful when you want a career in the creative industry!

I don't really have a favourite thumbnail so far, but it's early on in the process so I'm sure I'll find one that I'll be happy with later. For now, I'm going to keep coming up with basic ideas for each city, and once I've covered all of them I can continue on with developments of my all my favourites. It's a bit daunting thinking I have to make 100 thumbnails when I've found it quite challenging just to come up with 7, but I'm hoping as I get used to this process it'll become more natural to me.

Any advice or constructive criticism is appreciated!

Perspective

Hello!

Today I started work on my Invisible Cities project by doing some perspective drawing practice. The last time I tackled perspective was during art GCSE and I remember it being a very stressful and confusing subject. However, after going through some online tutorials I feel a lot more confident. Because I could go over the tutorials at my own pace, I didn't have any trouble learning about 1-point perspective, and then moving on to 2-point and 3-point. I'm pleased it was an easy exercise as perspective has always been something daunting to me but I've now realised it wasn't much to worry about at all. Here are my three sketchbook pages, showing 1,2 and 3 point perspective respectively. I prefer to use red (and blue) pencil in my sketchbook so I hope everybody can see it ok!

Now that I've completed this task, I'd like to move on to writing the 'Who's Who?' about my selected concept artist. I've already chosen who, it's just a matter of writing about them! Stay on the lookout for that as it'll be up in the next few days.