9```Building a World
7.15-7.21
Nothing much happened this week... I spent the majority of my time either looking at concept art or painting on my iPad to prepare my portfolio for Gnomon. I finally found myself getting into the zone for creating, and just got more and more excited for diving into game art in the future!
Preparing My Portfolio
My many years of immersion in high-achieving peers (especially last year in Princeton) taught me (SO well) what overachieving means. So, for the portfolio, I came up with a plan that, I think, is way beyond what the admissions asked for ten days ago. But I could have underestimated their rigor, which would make what I’m saying look incredibly stupid...
Well, essentially, I have a general structure for the world, which was inspired by a city in Invisible Cities. I made some changes in my adaptation, and decided to create 9 images to showcase the different parts of the world: from general views and architectural models, to specific interiors and props.
I will explain the concept and my inspiration when I finish my portfolio, and here are 5 almost-done images I made last week (including the one on the left) !
Since I could not find reference images for most of my ideas (especially the architecture ones), it took me a significant amount of time to just figure out how shadows, colors, and perspectives would work. But reworking on my mostly done pieces has been the most rewarding part of the process. (I spent the first five days of the week making one draft of each image, and the weekend adjusting the colors and details of the drafts.)
Below is an example: you can see that the left image, which was what I had after the first day, had a little bit of experimentation with stylized palettes, but the elements were very awkward next to each other. When I reworked on the piece on Saturday, I made a few color adjustments that seemed very “bold” at the time, but actually looks very natural now that I’ve spent more time with it (mostly the clouds and the green mountain in the middle)
This experience made me more observant about the color palettes when I look at concept art (especially really stylized ones. I listed three artists I loved from the week at the bottom of the page!) It’s so cool to see how unintuitive the colors actually are sometimes! After I finish this portfolio, I’d like to just copy some great concept art, study their color palettes, and experiment with bold color combinations.
Interesting Reads
1
A Separate Kind of Intelligence (Alison Gopnik)
AI & the child’s brain
“the explosion of machine learning as a basis for the new AI has made people appreciate the fact that if you’re interested in systems that are going to learn about the external world, the system that we know of that does that better than anything else is a human child.”
“One of the consequences of that, which is not so obvious, is thinking about children not just as immature forms who learn and grow into an adult intelligence, but as a separate kind of intelligence, which is implicit in the Turing quote. That fits with a lot of interesting ideas in evolutionary biology.”
“One of the consequences of that, which is not so obvious, is thinking about children not just as immature forms who learn and grow into an adult intelligence, but as a separate kind of intelligence, which is implicit in the Turing quote. That fits with a lot of interesting ideas in evolutionary biology.”
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2
Other PlacesA series of short films that took their footage from games, to showcase the worldbuilding
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3
Darran Anderson on the future of architecture
“Architecture’s eccentrics and outsiders can be retrospectively recast as prophets.”
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4
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
“When people concentrate on the idea of beauty, they are, without realizing it, confronted with the darkest thoughts that exist in this world. That, I suppose, is how human beings are made.”
Really Cool Concept Artists
1. Finnian MacManus ︎ ︎
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2. Theo Prins ︎
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3. Efflam Mercier ︎ ︎
