digital – arts, ink.

Welcome back to another week of Industrious Illustrating! This week I’m returning to discussing schoolwork and the creative process, as I’ve done for previous Industrious Illustrating columns.

For ARTDES 270: Visualizing and Depicting, we’ve been working on an assignment to create a short childrens’ board book about a letter of the alphabet. I ended up writing a book about mythological animals whose names start with the letter K. I made character designs and sketches in a mixture of watercolor and ink.

Before I made the final illustrations, I explored a few different approaches and mediums to figure out which one I liked best.

I tried gouache and colored pencil,

ink and collage, and digital painting.

In the end, I still ended up returning to using watercolors for the book project, but I now had a better idea of what I wanted to do with the character designs, compositions, and techniques in my final illustrations.

Next Friday I will post the finished layouts of my childrens’ book to compare between the conceptual process and the result. I hope everyone has a great and restful Thanksgiving break with the friends or family of their choice!

Video games are undoubtedly a work of art: they combine immersive graphics, impressive design, originally composed music, and complex writing and storytelling to create a cohesive masterpiece. Of course every game is different, and each has its strengths and weaknesses, but overall they’re one of the most unique and interesting ways in which many different art forms can come together. Surprisingly, I had never consciously acknowledged the cinematic qualities of video games, but I always found myself taking screenshots of amazing moments, or lining up the camera in just the right way to show off an impressive view or landscape. It could be argued that I’m a bit overly sentimental, and that’s probably true, but there is something so powerful about a cinematic picture of a great game and the associations that it creates. I’m not the only one that feels this way; many games have even added photo modes, allowing normal players to take stunning pictures in-game and share them with other players, plus the PlayStation 4 has both a snapshot and screen recording feature, testifying to the popularity of saving favorite gaming moments. I find this trend interesting, especially as games get more and more realistic. Is there a potential future where video games become a dominant medium for photography? Is it possible that video game photography could be its own art form? And who gets credit for the artistic value of the photo; the game developers who created it, or the photographer that took it? Regardless, here are some of my own video game photos as inspiration, and perhaps to get you thinking about the artistic value of the medium:

Tag: digital

Industrious Illustrating #19 – Material Explorations

Video Game Photography