alagam78

[alagam78]

Working with some new Index painting methods and super pleased with how it’s turning out

[alagam78]

Personal project. Prologue landscape.

Once again designed as another revisit to the original design of my first landscape, taking everything I have learned within previous tasks of developing my landscape works within my semiotics, collections and explain projects I have begun my first step into producing my overall final outcome. Process wise this piece I find really shows how far I’ve come in development with the quality of my work. 

On the downside however is with the overall scale of the work pieces such as these simply take a lot of time to develop to a finalized scale, this style of work is something I am committed in working on towards in the future but as for now it’s just the start of my next and biggest project.

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Personal Project. Concrete Children.

Illustration for me is my form of wish fulfillment. It is the practice I have developed for around 6 years in which I have used to construct narratives, concepts and semiotics through image. Storytelling has and always will be an inept part of my curiosity outside of my career, and with my drawing I aim to include this third dimension into my work. The time I’ve spent working on my craft is countless and often or not I find myself losing track of time whilst working. With the dilemma in illustration being that of visual communication my work’s aim is to combine my practical handiwork with my personal interest of world-building and storytelling to solve visual dilemmas. Aim: Which is why with this project I aim to produce a fully narrative series of illustrations with the aims of publishing the final outcome in book format, with a fully written script, storyboards, character designs all recorded within.

Which is why with this project I aim to produce a fully narrative series of illustrations with the aims of publishing the final outcome in book format, with a fully written script, storyboards, character designs all recorded within.

Taking place in a 1990s Europe, a group of four children embark on a journey away from their small residence of Grozni into the forest and overgrown ruins of Tselinoyarsk to try and find a runaway child from their neighbourhood, along their way the four begin to open up more about themselves and discover the dilemmas between themselves and their country land.

In terms of the visual and practical elements within this project I have looked at various sources of visual inspiration. With the pseudo-pixel art style of my final outcomes I have looked at several examples of computer games from the 16-bit era and emulated the graphical practises seen in these works. With the narrative and conceptual hand drawn work I have looked into the work of Henry Darger and his illustrations for the “Vivian Girls” book as the subject and narrative between the works is similar to my own work.

Over the past few project briefs I have revolved my work around the development and construction of Concrete Children, and with the Personal and Professional Project I hope to finally begin developing the final outcome.

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Semiotics Conclusion

Overall I am pleased with the outcome of this project, I really feel like I’ve stumbled upon a topic which has a lot of lead-way for development which also heavily kept me engaged and immersed within my own work with my aim to develop a series of worlds to characterize, whilst I did enjoy working on this project, with the concept of filling the brief in terms of semiotics, whilst I don’t think my landscapes are directly communicating in terms of their design its the content, colour and aesthetic which all blends together to create a kind of semiotic which entises and engages the viewer into my works.

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Semiotics. The lake ruins.

Within this final image of my semiotics project I wanted to further envelop the sense of a mystery within the world I have began developing within  the semiotics project. The potential with this project in future works is huge and although I’m still working on some very early concepts within this project this is a full series of works I aim to commit to finishing throughout summer. I feel with the past series of projects I have really stumbled across something special with the terms of aesthetics and focus on narrative and atmospheric illustrations which focus on telling stories, the past briefs have all sort of made their way together at some point into this final series of illustrations.

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Semiotics. The abandoned safehouse.

One of the core aspects of developing landscapes within the metropolis project is the concept of character building through the visuals of the landscape itself. The theory of show don’t tell, and more or less focus on subtle nuances within the scenery of said landscapes. With this piece mirroring one of the earlier pieces, the same kind of angle, the same kind of building seen where our main characters reside only this one appears much older, much more dilapidated, a lost relic of time left to nature. It’s the mirror between the old and the new, that this image is bound to repeat itself, and repeat itself unto the home of our main characters, to the four main characters they see this abandoned safe house as an inevitability towards them and their future. As they are all young children, barely brinking into their teenage years they have no say, no choice in their living conditions, where they live and now, they have choice in their future, for the main characters, this image of a rotting building, overgrown with forestation almost is their future.

With the development of the landscape itself this is one of the more impressive pieces in terms of design and concept, the idea of mirroring images to develop that sense of character through a landscape is achieved within this series of images and is process I hope I can continue to develop within my future works.

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Semiotics. Forest opening.

Within my next piece within the metropolis semiotics project I wanted to focus primarily on rendering organic material within the pixel art style. The odd shapes and designs which render organic landscapes such as blades of grass and rock formations seem to be something of a slight limitation when it comes to illustrating forestation within a pixel art style and thus I wanted to push the limitations of my abilities with this style in this piece.

The final outcome is perhaps one of my favorite works within this project, the attention to detail paired with the dithering style of blending really all comes together a lot better than I expected within this example, however with this said this piece in particular was once pain in the ass to complete with having to hand draw vegetation and plantlife pixel for pixel made completing this particular landscape a daunting and tedious challenge by the end of development.

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Semiotics. The car park.

Here is where I believe my work begins to develop into it’s own sense of style, the much more cartoonish nature of the other previous entries is now further replaced with a much more painterly style of illustration whilst still keeping that pixel art aesthetic and works exceptionally well. With this image I wanted to showcase the world in my project and the slow gradual development of urban decay, the setting in which the remainder of the local area has been deserted for some time in which nature is beginning to take over some of the more dilapidated areas. For referencing I looked heavily at my local area and it’s occurrences with derelict urban architecture.

The process in developing the amount of detail in this piece was with the use of overlaying brushes by adjusting the flow and setting of the brush to overlay the brush acts almost like a marker in which each stroke over each other darkens to a different shade giving the piece a more natural grade of shading which works impressively within the ground and car textures whilst keeping a strong level of detail.

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My second development of my external landscapes, with this piece more a revisit to my first attempt at an outside location as I knew improvement was needed upon it’s design, taking a lower angle shot from the building up adding a sense of scale and detail which was unseen in my first iteration of this location, I also added significantly less buildings to help solidify the concept of these isolated settlements drawn out between one another, that each settlement knows of each others presence but has no real way of directly interacting with one another.

This is my attempt at re-adapting the concept of the podunk small town, in which the series of main characters are raised in, an isolated small living area in which very little happens and with that said, the characters own futures and adult lives are fully undetermined and with the nature of their living conditions, their futures are something that their living quarters have not accounted for.

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When looking into examples of pixel art landscapes a series of small animated gifs appeared whichever way I looked, these animations often looked very subtle animations like lights flickering, shadows moving etc, here is a short attempt into animating a small loop. The doughnut shape rotating is a compressed video of a rotating 3d model. The overall production of the animation is satisfactory and a lot of praise was received upon it’s creation, it’s  a novel idea at adding slight animation into a piece and is an idea I may return to on a later notice.

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My second series within my landscape of semiotics.

Here is when my main focus on the storytelling aspect of my landscapes began to develop into full fruition, with the setting of my project, now renamed Concrete Children taking place in some point within a fictional area within Europe, the large skyscrapers surrounded by dense forestation are designed as a series of safe houses for some kind of disaster, from the view of the plane and the overall scale of these buildings I wanted to implement a feeling of distance and isolation between the clusters of buildings. To implement the idea that each cluster of buildings is its own isolated civilization.

This piece was technically my first landscape in design within the semiotics project and it shows, at this point my influences from Cameos are worn a little too closely for my taste and the overall quality and detail within this piece, within my later iterations of work will help to develop a more personal approach to this style of work.

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Within terms of inspiration within my landscape designs there is no other source of inspiration much like Cameo’s work, the amount of detail captured within the dithering process and such is astounding and there is a thorough mixture between the photo realistic structures of the landscapes architecture and vegetation, contrasting with the hazy dream-like colour palette and visual style of Cameo’s aesthetic.

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Semiotics Develop 1 The Apartment

With the characters within my previous project assembled I wanted to take the time to focus more on the locations and scenery of the landscape and world I wanted to create, with the focus on semiotics in mind I immediately chose to develop my piece around the concept of metropolis, with my previous project all about character design and development. I wanted to still implement that sense of characterization within my work on the semiotics project aswell as my previously developed aesthetic within the art of the accident project.

Originally designed to be a series of illustrations developing a footnotes version of my project’s plot, one of the key instances one of my course mates developed from my first landscape image is how atmospheric the landscapes are with their mise en scene and limited colour palette, with this said it seems my landscape images tend to be more a character than intended and so rather than using these images as mere backdrops my aim was to try and tell a story with each landscape within this series of work.

Onto the piece itself, I am ecstatic with the outcome of this indoor enviroment, the geometric nature of the room and objects in the frame really assisted in creating a crisp image with the structure of the pixel-esque design, and rather than individually dithering the piece pixel by pixel with my previous works, instead I have developed a full overlay grid which acts a dither filter which makes the blending of tone within the piece much more smoother and adds an added texture to an otherwise block colored image.