With regards to Games.

Although I'm starting to lean more down the illustration side of things, there are certain games that i feel i should mention here. 

The first is "The Darkness" a shooter from early Xbox 360 era that put you in the shoes of a mob hit man who gained the power of the darkness. You gained power when hidden in shadows, could impale enemies on huge dark tentacles that formed from two eel like creatures over each shoulder and generally cause mayhem. HOWEVER there was one part where you are transported to hell, represented by an eternal version of world war 1, fought between horribly distorted soldiers and huge machines of war. This section really captured my imagination and i thought it was the best part of the game. The huge open landscape shrouded in mist was so different to the rest of the game , and despite it probably being as linear as any other section i felt lost and over whelmed on the dark and dreary fields. 

Thematically these sections could be compared to Zdislaw Beksinski's work, as a lot of the landscapes are similar in tone to the background of level, and the influence of the world wars can be seen in both.

Skip to anywhere after 9-10 minutes into this video to see the section I'm referring to.

Another Game that i find takes the surrealist themes and makes them work, is 

Tormentum: Dark Sorrow

From www.ohnoo.com , the developers site.

"TORMENTUM is a dark Point & Click adventure game. The dreamlike, nightmarish atmosphere of the game was inspired by works of painters H.R. Giger and Zdzislaw Beksinski. The game's final look and feel was also strongly influenced by the universes of games such as Demon's Souls or Dark Seed."

As it is a point and click adventure game, the player interaction is limited, the character is rarely seen moving on screen, and there are only a few , minimal animations. It basically plays as an interactive art book, but what an art book it is. You can clearly see the influences of Zdislaw Beksinski and Giger in the work and there is such a depth to the pieces that they really do bring the world to life.

I plan to analyse some of the artist's work soon. (Piotr Ruszkowski )

Part of a play through of the game.

Jase Daniels analysis.

By Jase Daniels

This is a piece from one of my favourite artists, Jase Daniels. Ive decided to analyse the image to help inspire my artwork.

The image is of a clearly human head, it has eye sockets and a nose cavity, and the general shape of a skill with ears. All of the surface is heavily textured, by either vein like growths over the head or deep pitted scars and wrinkles in the bone. The mouth area is grown over with more of the vein like structures and there are strange ribbed growths around the neck and shoulder areas. There are finger like bone growths protruding from the back and sides of the neck, reminiscent of a lion fish, and you can see the vague outlines of shoulders looking hunched forward.

The face holds an expression of sorrow or indifference more than pain of fear like you would expect and the way the subject fades into the background gradually lends itself to this emotional ambiguity.

The colours used in this image are different than a lot of his other pieces, and that is in part why i am drawn to it. It uses a bold and vibrant purple for the face and veins, reminding me of the vines in the film "War of the Worlds". The Bright colour really draws the eye towards the face, and makes you recognise it as human.

To reproduce these effects i would start by blocking out the sculpt in dynamesh trying to capture all of the main shapes and strange growths. Then i would sculpt detail in over the top paying special attention to surface detail trying to imagine how light would play over the surface, then use the built in BPR renders to take lighting from various angles and in various strengths. From here i would take the renders into photoshop where i would colour the image further and add a background, then try to use an alpha map to blend the foreground and background together.

Surrealist Manifesto

http://www.tcf.ua.edu/Classes/Jbutler/T340/F98/SurrealistManifesto.htm

Surrealist Mannifesto

"Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of association heretofore neglected, in the omnipotence of the dream, and in the disinterested play of thought. It leads to the permanent destruction of all other psychic mechanisms and to its substitution for them in the solution of the principal problems of life."

One of my questions on the Mood Jellyfish was "What is Surrealism?". The areas that I've shown interest in before are Dystopian Surrealism, or surrealist with a horror theme, such as the works of H.R.Giger and Zdzisław Beksiński. But if I'm going to take the project further along these routes i need to know more about what makes things surreal.

The Surrealist Manifesto, written in 1924 explains some of the underlying thoughts behind the movement and the idea that dreams were a wonderful place where you could experience anything because the context and repercussions were taken from you when you awoke, and in some way this made it more real than what we go through during daily life.

Modelling the Environment

If i decide to do more illustration ill need to begin putting backgrounds into my work to make them look polished and bring them together as a final image. Until now my work has mostly just had a mist effect in the background, leaving the setting ambiguous but if i decide to change that ill need to know how to composite images and do so over a range of software.

"Modelling The Environment" by Bradley Cantrell and Natalie Yates.  available online from
http://reader.eblib.com/(S(0vrpgjggtfungjyuel2lsdza))/Reader.aspx?p=817438&o=118&u=P7AA4xAp6l98kfCjq6%2brvYe0ZqQ%3d&t=1442838384&h=8145BB931CC4F49F2C812C3284B2FA7CA5BB4471&s=38296574&ut=269&pg=1&r=img&c=-1&pat=n&cms=-1&sd=2#

starts to cover these topics in chapters 32 and 33, explaining some of the basics like creating alpha maps from renders and how to get the lighting and shadows to match across different sources.

Ideas Jellyfish

In our class this week we started discussing our ideas for our projects and mapping them out in what Lynn called a Jellyfish. She explained that this is a collection of all the questions we can think of to do with our area of interest. This should help us start to narrow down what it is we want to do , and how we can go about it.

I ended up having so many questions that i couldn't fit them on the page and still draw the Jellyfish around it, but despite it just looking  like a wall of vague questions it really helped. We were told that we had to ask ourselves the awkward questions, so points evolved from "How do i present Highly Polished Sculpts in a way that tells a story?" to "Why would a story make it interesting?" to "What is interesting?" and it really broke down my ideas to their base elements.

On the paper my ideas start in the middle, with wanting to do sculptures and surrealist themes but as the go further left they involve working towards illustrations and the sculpts as final pieces, whereas the questions further to the right are more centred around the games industry and how to make sculpts for creature and character designs.

Im still not sure which of the two routes I'm going to go down , but Lynn asked us to set 3 Tasks which we will complete before next week, I'm not sure if ill get it all done , but what i aim to do is.

1) Analyse a 3D illustration, taking its key themes, composition, my thoughts on the piece and on a technical level how i think i could reproduce it.

2) Do this same kind of analysis to a horror game, or game that uses dark themes

3) Produce a sculpt of some kind, whether aimed for games or illustration.

I would also like to find some relevant literature to read and start to think more about refining my subject area.

Initial Ideas for Project

Over the summer I've been thinking about ideas for what id like to do for my Honours Project, and I've come up with a few ideas, varying in scope, but roughly similar in theme. Ill discuss them with a lecturer over the next week and start to evolve my ideas a bit further.

For my honours i want to create more surrealist imagery, through both 2D and 3D mediums. Incorporated into this i would love to eventually work on a horror game using some of the same themes, so i could create a small playable area of a game to demonstrate the visuals, but also develop other skills such as level design and environment modelling, both of which are weak skills for me at the moment, and explore how to create that sense of dread in an interactive environment.

Id also like to look into creature and character design and sculpture for video games. I know that sculpting is becoming a more popular way to create game models due to its intuitive nature and high level of detail, and i think that designing characters based on some of the artwork that inspires me could be interesting.

I really enjoyed what i did for creative research last year, and would like to take that forward into this year. I explored surrealist art work and how to create it in 3D , mainly in ZBrush, then present it well with rendering techniques and photoshop. 

Such as this piece, a master study of the Zdzisław Beksiński painting known as "The Flute" or "The Horn". He is one of my major influences and id love to be able to create work with a similar atmosphere and aesthetic.

And this piece, which was one of my final pieces for Creative Research, using certain pieces of anatomy such as the nose to remind the viewer that they are looking at something vaguely human, and how the colours, composition and interaction with the background can affect the message and mood of the image. I composed the image in portrait to further imply that this was a face, even though aside from the nose, there is no anatomy that is shared.

Start of 4th Year

We had our first meeting with Lynn and David on Wednesday, and they told us that we should be starting our blogs right away. So I've set up this blog to use, under the same Blogger account as my third year blogs to keep it organised. They also said to read the handbook and organise a meeting with a staff member reasonably soon to discuss our ideas for honours projects.