CPS - Week 9: Forces

By Amber Stacey

Context:

This week’s challenge asks the question of how can we still be creative through forced restrictions, which in turn, forces us to think outside the box a little more and beyond our natural way of working, in order to create a new style, develop new skills and explore new methods or tools.

The three rules I chose to explore were:   

• Everything is Melting
• Everything is Alive
• Black and White A4 print

Thinking about how ‘melting’ could be demonstrated through a 2D space and mixed with life, this led me to find some inspiration behind Salvador Dali’s painting “The Persistance of Memory” in which this surrealism art piece demonstrates exploring “softness and hardness” through melting soft pocket watches. "The soft watches are an unconscious symbol of the relativity of space and time, a Surrealist meditation on the collapse of our notions of a fixed cosmic order". 

Surrealism: a style of art stressing the subconscious or nonrational significance of imagery arrived at by automatism or the exploitation of chance effects, unexpected juxtapositions, etc.

The second source of inspiration was global warming and thinking back to character, place and events and how events help to form and shape characters. How is the earth being affected by Global warming? Our atmosphere is becoming more hotter and unpredictable because of an effect cause by the heat-trapping of greenhouse gases within the upper layers of the atmosphere, known as “Boiling and Churning”. One major worry out of all this is the Antartic melting.

With that in mind, this week’s challenge will be a combination of reality and surrealism in order to combine the three rules applied and reflect another area of animation and game design through design development and creating concept art.

Method:

I will create a concept art piece in black and white through Photoshop, in order to reflect the rules through rough digital painting.

Response:

I thought about the issue of climate change and how I could essentially apply everything to be melting and alive and researched many items/objects being melted and how I might apply some of these outcomes to my illustration.

I began by sketching out a rough layout for elements and started painting it out in a rough manner in photoshop. The outcome reflects the idea that the earth is melting due to global warming and demonstrates the earth being alive through the skull reaching out of the ground, along with every other element melting.- whether it be the moon, mountains, trees, polar bear, ground or flower. Through trying to illustrate trees melting, they inadvertently became characters themselves and appear to be live figures walking their way through the land as they slowly melt away.  By applying the black and white rule, this provides the context with a grim and hopeless outlook of the events occuring.

Development Process attached below.