APP – Thoughts

For me, the main purpose of the APP projects was to test out and experiment with different styles that might involve a graphics tablet. I wanted to hopefully find a style with these projects that I could finally stick to now and in the future as well as only develop on this style. I think that I have found the style I have been looking for all this time in the 2116AD project. I think that this whole photo-realistic landscape style that I did for the project is a great fit for me.

Most of the problems in this APP project only consisted of the heroes section. I had trouble coming up with suitable funny ideas whereas in the end I pretty much thought of nature and used then as heroes that would be pointless. If I had to improve anything with these APP Projects, most of the improvements would have to be with the Heroes topic and the reason for this is that I had some trouble actually finalizing the designs of some of them, for example, The Ooze and Grass dude. I think that I should have spent more time on these designs or even changed the design style so that they can consist with the same style as the other designs. I can tell that I won’t be sticking to creating funny comedic cartoons anytime soon but I wouldn’t mind giving it another go but with a different subject other than pointless heroes.

The strongest project within the topics I’ve done for the APP would have to be the first project that I did for prep world (fruit factory). The reason I think and feel like this was the strongest project is that I got to show my skills while working on the project independently and in a group. I also think that I tackled the majority of the problems that were set by the client in a respectable manner to come out with the final piece that I did. Additionally, this project was the shortest project (time length) and I feel like I did more work for this project than the other 2 topics.

 

APP – Final Designs

Prepworld (Fruit Factory):

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2116AD (Post-apocalypse landscape):

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Heroes (Pointless Heroes):

APP – 2116AD: Final Piece & Evaluation

Here is the final piece. A piece of concept art of the new post-apocalypse world that I designed for the client.

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Evaluation

The main idea for this project is that in 2016, nuclear bombs have been dropped all across the globe and now 99% of the population has been destroyed along with the wildlife. I am to design concept art (whether its multiple designs or not) to what I think the aftermath of the thermonuclear war looks like 100 years in the future in 2116AD.

One of the things that I wished I could have had or have done was to have more time actually creating more concepts because I really enjoyed making theses but with the dissertation being a slight problem for me considering that I’ve always had problems with essays, I didn’t do as good as I expected. I feel like I could have created more concept art only if I didn’t have problems with the dissertation.

Other than that I’m happy with what I have accomplished in this ‘realistic to the eye’ piece. An aim for myself in the topic for me was to find a style of designing that I could initially stick to in the future as well as gain a skill of making the concept art look sort of photo-realistic but of course not too realistic that you can’t see the actual artwork. I want people to be able to see the some of the brush strokes on the canvas and i believe that i have achieved this.

But looking back at the design I feel like I could have added more debris in the canvas so that it looks like the nuclear bombs done major damage or even add part of a broken roof just lying there on the floor. Another thing that I could have done was create this during the day but have loads of clouds to give the concept art a dark, depressing feel to it. Also i wish i had more time to fix the radioactive fire clouds in the background to make them look better than what they look like now as well as I think I should have done another piece of concept art considering all I did was just one detail concept art but I didn’t have a lot of time to complete this. So next time when i design, I will make sure that I do better time management with all the projects that I have going on so that I can meet up with deadlines and have multiple finished pieces.

APP – 2116AD: Development pt.3

Pretty much the next step I will be undertaking is just filling the background of the concept art as well as maintaining the post-apocalypse scene.

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Since the beginning of this project, when I talked about nuclear bombs and such, I’ve always wanted to add a sort of nuclear fire sky/clouds in this design. So I went ahead and added the radioactive fire clouds in the distance behind the building but I think that people will mistake it for artificial light or even a fire.

Once I got the city in the background done, I thought that the design itself didn’t look like a post-apocalypse place, as well as I thought the design need more. so I went on the game fallout 4 and realized that in the game, there are a lot of dead trees just lying on the ground as well as trees that are standing perfectly up but has no leaves what so ever.

Using this to my advantage, I went ahead and added a couple of trees into the design.

Now that I get the impression that something bad has destroyed these trees, I thought that there wasn’t much else to put into the composition.

All I did next was just sorting out a few things and adding more light/dark highlights as well as I thought I would add a small color correction to the design to sort out some irregularities.

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A slight change in the color of the mood on the design and it just changes the whole scene. I really like how the light/dark highlights turned out as well as the slight color correction change.

 

 

APP – 2116AD: Development pt.2

Now it’s time to start adding to the sides of the composition and I think that I’m going to stick with dirt rather than a desert-like soil as I will be showing a city in the background with loads of buildings and it would be logical to have dirt because there are not many civilised cities in the desert.

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After I got the dirt part of the sides done, to improve on it, I thought I should add a dirt texture over it to give it more volume.

Now I got and added the texture on the dirt itself, I feel like the dirt just feels plain on its own. So I decided to play around and started adding grass and debris to give it the post-apocalypse and empty feel. To help me get an idea of what debris I could put in the design, I had to look at even more images to see what is common and by the looks of its pallets, wood, and broken furniture seems to be popular when you look up debris.

I didn’t want to add too much and fill the entire design full of debris because I want to keep the design clean and not too crowded otherwise having too much debris might ruin the atmosphere of the work.

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Once the grass and the small amounts of debris looked good enough, I went ahead and added some pylons into the design that are broken like the ones in the movie ‘The Road’.

Having pylons in this time period can be a little stupid, to be honest, because the nuclear blast wave would have completely destroyed everything and you would really see standing pylons anywhere near the blast radius. But I want to show that there are people still trying to rebuild the ‘NEW’ civilization so having dodgy pylons up could potentially show and give that impression. Well, that’s what I am hoping for.

Next, i started sketching and designing a destroyed car that is inspired by the 1940/50s to fill up the right-hand side of the concept art.

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Next step for me is to start doing the background and add more stuff that would represent a post-apocalypse scenario into the design. Currently, I am happy with how this concept art is looking and I’m starting to like the style I have currently created for myself to stick to.

APP – 2116AD: More inspiration

Fallout 4 setting:

“Fallout 4 takes place in the year 2287, ten years after the events of Fallout 3 and 210 years after a Resource War over natural resources that ended in a nuclear holocaust in 2077. The setting is a post-apocalyptic retro-future, covering a region that includes Boston, Massachusetts and other parts of New England known as “The Commonwealth”. Unlike the previous titles, Fallout 4‘s story begins on the day the bombs dropped: October 23, 2077. The player’s character takes shelter in Vault 111, emerging exactly 210 years later, on October 23, 2287.

The game takes place in an alternate version of history that sees the 1940s’ and 1950s’ aesthetics, design and technology advance in the directions imagined at the time. The resulting universe is thus a retro-futuristic one, where the technology has evolved enough to produce laser weapons, manipulate genes and create nearly-autonomous artificial intelligence, but all within the confines of 1950s’ solutions like the widespread use of atomic power and vacuum tubes, as well as having the integrated circuitry of the digital age. The architecture, advertisements and general living styles are also depicted to be largely unchanged since the 1950s, while including contemporary products, such as a robotic rocking horse for children in one advertisement, or posters for the underground vaults that play a central role in the storyline of the game.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallout_4

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Everyone knows that I’m a video game enthusiast and I get most of my ideas mainly from video games and movies but fallout 4 for this specific topic I’m doing is my main inspiration.

You can see a similar feature in my design that I’m doing compared to some of these images from the game. For example, in the first image, there is a road with a city in the far distance and you can see much except a barren wasteland of debris.

Hard to put into words what I think about these images but one thing I like about these fallout 4’s images is that the people who made the game, they are somewhat trying to make this post-apocalyptic place look quiet with no one around as well as at the same time I think they are trying to show the beautiful side to what this tragic global thermonuclear war has done. For example, the bombs have destroyed a civilization but the tranquility of the area just makes the landscape looks beautiful and surreal.

I also like the fact that in fallout 4, you are playing in the year of 2287, 210 years after “The Great War” in 2077 that caused catastrophic nuclear devastation across the United States, so this is a game that i have much faith in to call my main inspiration for this specific ‘2116AD’ topic

One of the main things about fallout 4 that i love is the 1940/50s look. Hopefully if i have room in my design, i will design and add a car that looks similar to the image above to my work.

APP – 2116AD: Development pt.1

Now I looked through some research on the post-apocalypse genre and about nuclear bombs, I feel like its time to at least start my journey into creating a concept art for the imaginary client.

So to start off, I went ahead and sketched up a few ideas to see what I could do with the composition of the design. I know that I want to show the destruction of the global thermonuclear skirmish, but I also want to show that the people who survived the bombs are actually slowly rebuilding a city of some sorts. I also want to add a sense of drama into the image as well as a story so that when people just look at the image, they can come up with theories of what is happening or have happened but I can’t look focus on the objective of creating concept art for a games company for a new game.

Once I quickly sketched a few ideas and tried different compositions, realized that i liked the idea of having a road leading to the horizon with something at the end. So now I got the main idea/concept all sketched up. I felt like it was time to go ahead and start designing the actual concept art.

I decided to use an A4 resolution with a solid 300ppi. I also feel like I should try to make this concept art as detailed as I can as well as trying to find a specific style that will suit me and I could potentially use in the future.

But for my design, the first thing I wanted to do was start with the road part so then I can work around that and help me create this broken road, I went ahead and looked up roads that were damaged.

Now that I got a slight idea of what broken roads look like with the shading on certain areas, I went ahead and started quickly sketching a broken road.

Having a nice quick sketch of a broken road done, stopping about half way up the canvas to show the top of the hill on the horizon going towards the destroyed buildings. The next step was to quickly decide whether or not if I would like the art to be set at night or during the day and having come up with a quick solution, I thought it would be best to have the art set at night to create a certain dark mood within the design. So I looked up night time to see how colors look on certain objects when there is no artificial light around to illuminate the area.

After seeing that during the night, everything seems to be a shade of blue with only the moon just giving the planet a nice shine to it. Now I can go ahead and start adding some basic colors to the road to make it look sort of realistic and all 3D.

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Now that I got most of the road done, I went online to find a free to use texture to help give the road a better look and not just a plain look. Plus adding a grit texture to the road will make it seem a bit more realistic.

Now that the road is pretty much finished, the next step will be to start on the sides and find what i can put on the bottom half of this design.

 

 

APP – 2116AD: Post-apocalyptic movies

I know I’ve seen multiple movies in the past that shows a post-apocalypse scenario and I thought if I’d rewatch them and watch some more movies, I could get some ideas to help create a piece of concept art for a new post-apocalypse world.

I watched the famous movie called ‘Mad Max: fury road’ and I realized that it is set in a different but very similar type of post-apocalypse world that what I want to do. At the start of the movie, it shows a brief few minutes of how and why this world has become full of this desert, barren wasteland and it’s like what my story for my project is. In the movie, it says that there was a nuclear skirmish and that the earth is dry and salty. I personally don’t believe that this is what will happen in a global thermonuclear skirmish happened, although it is a theory, it does have some factors that I could use in my work.

I haven’t watched the movie called ‘The Road’ but just looking at the images from the film, I feel like it could be the perfect film to use for inspiration especially with the image above with the long road and broken pylons and poles everywhere with individuals slowly walking away. I just like this idea for some reason, probably because it shows that the world has been destroyed and is in ruins as well as it shows another theory as to what a post-apocalypse scenario looks like.

Considering that most films and designs show different types of factors to the post-apocalyptic scene, I think it would be best to not have any individual in the design at the moment but only to show what destruction has happened with this world’s nuclear fallout. Theses types of films are great to watch and are a great inspiration for me.

 

APP – 2116AD: Real life disasters

A ferry is perched on top of a house in the aftermath of an earthquake and tsunami in Otsuchi, Iwate prefecture March 13, 2011. REUTERS/Yomiuri (JAPAN – Tags: DISASTER ENVIRONMENT IMAGES OF THE DAY) FOR EDITORIAL USE ONLY. NOT FOR SALE FOR MARKETING OR ADVERTISING CAMPAIGNS. JAPAN OUT. NO COMMERCIAL OR EDITORIAL SALES IN JAPAN

Although it’s depressing to look at but looking at these types of images, especially the real-life disasters that happens with tsunamis, it helps me get a good understanding of what it may look like 100 years later of global thermonuclear destruction. If there were nuclear bombs dropped everywhere on earth at one, they could potentially set of a chain reaction with nature, for example people talking about a nuclear winter, you could shake the very Earth itself and move its tectonic plates which could also create tsunamis (anything could happen, but all we know of what will be there is inevitable destruction).If you think about it a nuclear bomb blast is kinda like a tsunami, the power of the bomb would create a powerful force that would burn someone to death and tear away buildings so I could technically use these images as references to help me create some sort of landscape for the concept art. There would be debris everywhere, destroyed buildings, no one around etc. I could always look back these type of images to get an idea of what I could add in my design.

APP – 2116AD: Some Existing Concept Art

The first thing I needed to do was to get a better knowledge and look around to see what other concept art is out there already. And one thing is for sure, there are a lot of art in the post-apocalypse genre and this is a good thing because this can help me understand what the basics of a post-apocalypse theme are.

I noticed that in this selection of post-apocalypse concept art, there are still a lot of activity although there are no one around in the art. I also noticed that everyone has taken up the idea of a post-apocalyptic world differently and this can show that there is no right or wrong design, there is only what you can imagine especially considering that we really witnessed a post-apocalypse scenario.  Another thing about this designs that have in common is that they all most use buildings as some sort of symbol to show the world that has been destroyed.

Looking at these has given me a few ideas that I think could help get an idea going. For example, I like the idea of having a long road leading to somewhere, whether it leads you to somewhere important, it’s irrelevant. It’s how lonely the road is without anyone in sight and this can give a piece of art a mood for an audience to feel. I also like the idea that you start to notice what the place is, although it has been destroyed, it helps people actually believe that this could happen in the future. One thing I like most of the concept art is that there is a common trend of the use of the colour orange to depict the post-apocalypse scenario but I don’t feel like it is necessary to include this in the work especially when there are other ways to help portray this like a destroyed place but it’s full of green (moss type of stuff)