FMP: The Future

My 'Final Major Project' in my 2nd year of College

My project was all about ‘The Future’ but not necessarily in a positive light. I explored a lot of dystopian ideas and scenarios of the kind of world we could be living in at some point. The purpose was to show my ideas and predictions of the future based on valid research in a visual form for people to enjoy but also for them to question about how their actions of the present that will come with consequences in years to come. I wanted to go the more conceptual route, since I am wanting to go into concept art for games as a career, the ideas are not so obvious but with more thought the concept and purpose becomes clear, especially more the case with the character design work.

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I had done a lot of secondary research prior to the project, to get a promising idea on what exactly I want my project to show, and I had also asked a lot of my peers to fill in a questionnaire on topics that I wanted to cover and at least have a better understanding of how they feel about certain subjects revolving the future, so that I can become more connected with my audience and therefore know what to work on for my project.

Within the first few weeks of the project, I ventured out and got a lot of primary research images of around Dover. I managed to get a lot on waste, wreckage, and vandalism in the area, which helped a lot for visual reference on the wasteland side of the project (and for inspiration), but I also managed to find a lot to do with elements which tended to help me in more abstract ways through shapes that I discovered later in my work. I went to some parks and got many images of nature, such as flowers, trees, and also water in its natural state in ponds and rivers. Due to bad timing, I didn’t manage to get very adventurous with my primary research images post operation, so a lot of it I had to do from home by taking shoots of fire and water in the house, but I also had to dig out some images from summer that I had taken of things like abandoned cars and overgrown areas that fit perfectly with my project.

Using the primary research images that I had collected, I created observational drawings of things that I felt related to my theme the most, I was most happy with my abandoned car painting that I created using diluted coffee, watercolours, and fine liners, which the mediums were simply perfect for the nature of the image, and the strong line art was very reminiscent of street art, which is fitting because the car happened to be graffitied.

I had done a lot of research into multiple art movements. I started off the project looking at street art, due to the nature of it being about talking about political and environmental issues in the world, and this happen to be what I wanted to do for my project and the purpose of it. I was also interested in surrealism and the creativity behind it, so I looked at a lot of the techniques that they use in surrealist work, and I thought about perhaps experimenting with that later in my project so that i had options for more abstract techniques and therefore more unique ideas. I covered a lot of art movements in my project, especially at the beginning of the project because I was not too sure what each one was all about, and I wanted to investigate more into ones that I did not know about just for general knowledge. Of all of them I happened to take a lot of inspiration nearer the end of the project for my final piece form rococo and art nouveau, especially more the style from Alphonse Mucha who happened to be an influential artist within the art nouveau movement. I created my own interpretation of his work and I happened to take an interest in his mix of graphic design and fine art style. A key element of his work is the influences of nature and the distinct line art around the figures in his work, which I happened to replicate in a more modern way in my final pieces. Similarly, I looked at rococo patterns and some in art nouveau work to help influence more nature-like patterns in my work to give my illustrations more environmental context

I used one of the shapes relating to my primary research images to create a very hellish but also ghostly character design made with graphite pencils and using the shape to keep restraints when creating my character helped a lot with making more unique character designs. Thinking back on it I think ink would've been a better medium, especially with diluted ink to get the same range in tones as I could with the pencil, since ink can get a lot darker, and you can have a greater contrast with the medium as supposed to pencil where it can only get so dark.

I also created a version with the colours in a digital version of it, just as an experiment version, which I thought gave it more context with the green/brown as a ghost sent or created by nature, as the colours are symbolic of nature.

Later into the project I investigated concept art, since this is what I want to do in the future, but it also tied in with what I wanted to do for my final piece. My plan for the final piece was to make a series of illustrations exploring concepts within my project, so I made research pages on things like how to make successful character art, landscape art and more to help me along with my ideas and keep me restrained with the type of work I was going to do.

I created pages of drawings distinguishing between the difference of anatomy for typical female and male bodies to help me with the character design work later it the project, I tend to struggle a lot with muscle placement and knowing all of this helped a lot when getting poses right.

Since it fit more contextually with what I wanted to do I investigated the style of games artist but also the art of the actual games themselves too. Jason Chan, Victor Mosquera and Pascal Blanche are all artists I had looked into for inspiration on how they tackle concept art, especially more with landscape stuff, since these artists are creative in the way they use colour and shape to show scenes and characters. I also looked into the art style of Borderlands, nearer when I was doing my final piece, since they happen to use line art around their images too, much like Alphonse Mucha, so by looking at the more modern approach to help me with my version this helped in me in replicating the style onto my own illustrations. I also looked at one of my favourite games, Days Gone, since the subject matter closely matches with some ideas I wanted to explore for my project, and then I also looked at the work behind the game, from artists such as Caleb Gresham and john Demarchi.

I took a lot of inspirational from an illustrator called Aryan Oberto who explores themes like mutation and very warped, twisted and stretched looking faces, and I used this kind of dark style in one of my final illustrations that was representative of agriculture and earth, as a way to show the rococo patterns in a more dark and almost engraved way. Following dark themes, I took inspiration from a viral animation called ‘Save Ralph’ (-Taika Waititi) that explored a lot of issues with animal cruelty and how animal testing should be stopped and used the general topic as a motive behind one of my portrait illustrations.

A lot of problem solving came into play with deciding what I wanted to take forward and what I did not when it came to the experiment and development stages of the project. I ended up abandoning a lot of promising ideas for the sake of having relevant material but also realistic time expectations of how long I had to do my final outcomes were very important to consider.

I did a lot of planning for my outcome through visual experimentation and written plans of things all revolving my outcome. Prior to starting the work of the final outcome, I researched a bit into my target audience and laid out who my project was supposed to appeal to so that I could keep coming back to this and make changes to fit the viewers. Along with this I investigated the type of thing I wanted to make, being more specific with what I wanted in each piece along with, what I would have to do to plan for this, what I would potentially need to make it and how much it would all cost. This helped a lot with getting to grips with working towards my final outcome.

I had also created many landscape thumbnails inspired by my dystopian landscape research, though these were quick sketches, they helped a lot more with general composition of what I wanted to rather than the more detailed stuff. I also created studies on waste, so I knew how to draw things to include in these scenes. Then I worked more into these ideas by making tear sheets of the strongest ideas on photoshop, and the ones that would offer more variation on scenarios that I wanted to explore. I ended up heavily relying on these for my final piece so that I could solely focus on detail and texture rather than trying to get things looking right, since it saved me a lot of time.

I have learnt through my project that colour has been the one thing that presents the overall dark mood and nature of my dystopian theme the most, along with obvious subject matter that is associated with the concept. Visual language will also come into play with how my audience will react with my work. My landscape illustrations happen to be incredibly detailed, and therefore texture is very prominent in areas of the piece. Typically, a lot of older audiences will look to enjoy work that has had a lot of time and effort gone into them, work that highlights a lot of use of line, shape, and texture along with incredible amounts of detail and more realistic colour schemes, whereas a lot of younger viewers will look to enjoy work that is very abstract and colourful. A more minimalistic approach in detail is more favoured by a younger audience.