2013: Concept Art class

Getting closer and closer to being caught up with recent work now! Let's take a look at some of the things I did for Concept Art class that I am happy to show. The first thing I want to show is an assignment where we had to take a picture of ourselves with a certain emotion, and then amplify that through digital photo manipulation and painting over it. The picture I took of myself looked like sadistic glee, so I ended up with a violent-happy biker ork.

Second is an assignment that spawned off of the previous one. We all had to vote on the one we liked best, and then come up with 25 quick thumbnails and an equally quick initial speedpaint based on that character, based on a brief that would accompany it.

 

The character we voted on (not mine).

2013: Project Sell-It

Project Sell-It was the first project of the 2nd year. In this, we had three weeks to work together with marketing students to come up with a game that we would pitch to a publisher. We were tasked with coming up with a game that would last 5 minutes, had monetary value, and would deliver an emotion.

What our group of five came up with was a game which would abuse a loophole. We came up with something that had 5 minute play sessions, but which also had multiple divergent paths as well as multiple areas and three diverse characters. It was based on the 'save scumming' principle, which comes from games that allow multiple choices (mostly RPGs): Do something, then reload to see how it could have been done differently. So for our game you could play it, then be encouraged to start up again and see how you could have done things differently.

It was story focused, but did not have dialogue or anything written down: Everything would be driven by what the player did and saw to tell a small, personal story. The setting was post-apocalyptic, but tried to offer something different by setting it right after the bombs fell. The boy had to go into the city to find medicine for his father, the old man had to go into the subways to retrieve a photobook he left behind while he fled the city (the only keepsake he has left of his friends and family), and a teenage girl that has to go into the woods to hunt for food. It could be monetized with an initial sale that offered the three standard characters, and then it could be taken further by offering new modules, each with (a) new character(s) and/or area(s).

2013: Project 'Vrij'

The end of the first schoolyear came with Project 'Vrij', a free project  where we could do what we want as long as it had to be a ride of some kind. What we ended up going with for this was an interactive installation where the user would step into a booth where they would meet an actor that played a doctor. They would focus on the screen, which would show a serene image while the doctor asked them questions, but then it'd take a turn for the worse, the world turning nightmarish while they were placed into the role of a patient that had forgotten about why he was in a mental installation.

One of the things I did for this project and can show is the unused flashback images, which would trigger at certain intervals. These images would flash very briefly, telling a story of what happened to that patient while also serving as shocking images that build in intensity. We ended up scrapping it though.

2013: Worldbuilding seminar.

Now we get to the good stuff. The first half year at the HKU was fairly light on actual art assignments, and while I kept myself busy with several sketches, that is not material I deem good enough to share on this blog. Instead, I will skip to the first truly interesting thing I did. The month January is always reserved for seminars taught by 4th year students, and I choose worldbuilding because that offered a chance to do both art and design.

We were tasked with creating a planet with it it's own culture, ecosystem, religion, etc. I decided to try something different and base it on a gasplanet, where several kinds of creatures would thrive. The most important part of this ecosystem were floating micro-creatures that grouped together and formed giant organisms that were, essentially, islands. The animals that lived on this world were divided into several types: Flying, able to land, and ground locked.

It was a very fun seminar that allowed me to go wild with my imagination, trying to balance all the various factors out to keep it both fantastical but also believable within it's own rulesets, and I am still pleased with the results.