There is something irrepressibly joyous about your body of work so far; you've got a very distinctive style characterised by a lightness of touch and ease with abstraction, and in this context, your style is very much working for you (though it may be something you have to watch in different creative contexts). While I love the most recent pages of your sketches, which shows us more of your city, I am a bit confused as to the exact ordering of your structure; is Baucis on a plateau, which itself is high in the clouds, with the city higher still above the tree-line on the plateau - or is the plateau itself on stilts we cannot see? I think the answer if the former, not the latter? If so, Baucis doesn't seem as if it's stilts are high enough, as from these drawings it does look quite possible that someone could climb one of those trees and then see all of Baucis laid out before them. Right now, Baucis resembles more a tree-top city, as opposed to a city so high up in the sky its inhabitants are mysterious...
I like very much the idea of Baucis being a modern metropolis fashioned from natural materials; that said, in terms of the whole foliage issue, if Baucis is truly as high up as Calvino suggests, it maybe that you need to rethink thinks a little; you might want to look at the category of plants known as epiphytes - basically plants that derive their nutrition from the air (as opposed to the soil, which arguably there would be less of all the way up there...):
(This might be interesting, because it sort of suggests that your forest might be a rainforest, as opposed to the lollipop-style woodland you've been depicting thus far?).
In terms of your interior shot, I think it's a creative opportunity for a concept artist to identify a 'special space with a clear function', as opposed to somewhere more generalised. I wonder if the telescopes are key to this, and perhaps thinking nice and big about it would help; so instead of thinking of those spyglasses as human-scale 'pirate-sized' versions, you might want to think of them as being something more in the line of this: http://www.astronomynotes.com/telescop/hale200.jpg or indeed this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGVbNhrjT8w
The idea being that 'earth studies' hold some kind of great cultural importance in Baucis.
I guess I'm still pushing you to 'open up' your city still further in terms of all that it might be, so extrapolating further logic from its situation and from what little we know about its inhabitants. Your style as a 'diminutive' effect - i.e. it makes everything seem small and charming. This is by no means a criticism, but when it comes to choosing your three images, remember what your role as a concept artist is: to create a 'wow' factor - to evoke a believable civilisation though small bits of inventive production design (aligned with the logic of visual concept), and to salivate at the prospect of seeing it translated into CGI...
OGR 08/10/15
ReplyDeleteMorning Tom,
There is something irrepressibly joyous about your body of work so far; you've got a very distinctive style characterised by a lightness of touch and ease with abstraction, and in this context, your style is very much working for you (though it may be something you have to watch in different creative contexts). While I love the most recent pages of your sketches, which shows us more of your city, I am a bit confused as to the exact ordering of your structure; is Baucis on a plateau, which itself is high in the clouds, with the city higher still above the tree-line on the plateau - or is the plateau itself on stilts we cannot see? I think the answer if the former, not the latter? If so, Baucis doesn't seem as if it's stilts are high enough, as from these drawings it does look quite possible that someone could climb one of those trees and then see all of Baucis laid out before them. Right now, Baucis resembles more a tree-top city, as opposed to a city so high up in the sky its inhabitants are mysterious...
I like very much the idea of Baucis being a modern metropolis fashioned from natural materials; that said, in terms of the whole foliage issue, if Baucis is truly as high up as Calvino suggests, it maybe that you need to rethink thinks a little; you might want to look at the category of plants known as epiphytes - basically plants that derive their nutrition from the air (as opposed to the soil, which arguably there would be less of all the way up there...):
http://www.livingrainforest.org/about-rainforests/the-high-life-epiphytes/
(This might be interesting, because it sort of suggests that your forest might be a rainforest, as opposed to the lollipop-style woodland you've been depicting thus far?).
In terms of your interior shot, I think it's a creative opportunity for a concept artist to identify a 'special space with a clear function', as opposed to somewhere more generalised. I wonder if the telescopes are key to this, and perhaps thinking nice and big about it would help; so instead of thinking of those spyglasses as human-scale 'pirate-sized' versions, you might want to think of them as being something more in the line of this:
http://www.astronomynotes.com/telescop/hale200.jpg
or indeed this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGVbNhrjT8w
The idea being that 'earth studies' hold some kind of great cultural importance in Baucis.
I guess I'm still pushing you to 'open up' your city still further in terms of all that it might be, so extrapolating further logic from its situation and from what little we know about its inhabitants. Your style as a 'diminutive' effect - i.e. it makes everything seem small and charming. This is by no means a criticism, but when it comes to choosing your three images, remember what your role as a concept artist is: to create a 'wow' factor - to evoke a believable civilisation though small bits of inventive production design (aligned with the logic of visual concept), and to salivate at the prospect of seeing it translated into CGI...