Well, for this post I will explain my rationale behind by blog image , how the fusion of two different art styles resulted in this image, and why it changed so much from the early development stages.
First off, I'll touch on the idea behind the image.
The main purpose was to create an artwork which also contained the influence of another designer, in this case the other person who I am referencing will be Philippe Starck his profile can be located on an earlier posting.
Starck's main design style mainly focuses on making streamlined and practical household products. Taking this into consideration, I decided to focus on his habit of streamlining designs. The reason why I focused on streamlining was because my previous illustrations mainly consisted of designs which were both large and bulky. By making a streamlined design I would be trying something new which I have never considered doing, and at the same time I will be able to fuse two different art styles together.
I started out by drawing a bulky design, which can also be seen in my development submission package, and slowly worked from there to form a more rounded, curvy, streamlined form. After reaching at least stage 3 of the streamlining process and taking a good look back at the original design, I had a really good laugh after seeing the drastic changes involved. The design basically went from blocky, to triangular, to pointed, and finally a curved and streamlined look.
Each design itself was refined until I was satisfied. I was honestly very satisfied once I drew the first streamlined outline, but I felt that it wasn't enough, so I refined it again and again until I eventually hit the final design, which was full of curves and had minimal amounts of straight lines. Joints became circular, and the overall form was changed to feel more organic, this is most noticeable in the arm area.
After this came the color scheme. I immediately got stumped. I had no idea how to follow Starck's coloring style as he did not use a constant coloring style in his products as he does not create single expressive pieces. During the development process I decided to try as many color schemes as possible, even using orange and grey as these colors are the main colors on his website.
Having done some research, he is most famous for using wood, plastic, metal, and glass in his furniture, but I had no idea how to properly incorporate this into a mainly robotic design.
So... how did I solve this problem?
Simple.
Since Starck most commonly used aluminum, I added a gray finish to simulate metal, and added different types of shading to make the finish stand out. After referring to his previous works (or more accurately the w.w stool and the S+ark Microsoft mouse), I decided to use a dark blue color scheme which radiated blue light from certain features such as the chest and eye areas. I did not want to make it glow too much because it would take the focus off streamlining and put it on glowing blue instead.
An example:
I was pretty satisfied, so I went on to the next step. Posing.
I eventually went with the second pose because the focus would be more on the design and it wasn't as odd as the first pose.
Having done that I eventually drew another image in pose #2, then made a wave background to give it a futuristic and streamlined look. I originally had the concept of putting cartoon-like representations of the 4 commonly used materials, but I decided that it kind of spoiled the image because one looked extremely serious and the rest was off character.
This was the unused concept:
Having done that I eventually changed the design of the background to include an aluminum finish because that is a popular choice made by starck when metal finish is concerned.
I added the finishing touches by duplicating the image of my design and fading it against the metal. My more commonly used font, in this case it is Bank Gothic, was used for the blog title.
I titled it the "Soul of metal", because the mechanical designs are mainly regarded as lifeless metal constructs but I believe that each machine has its own purpose to fulfill and that they are all built for a reason and therefore they are all "alive" until they have truly finished serving their purpose. The blog's theme was mainly made to match the image as the color for the overall background was also dark blue to match the colors of the banner.
Furthermore, unlike the more recent habit of giving them lifeless eyes I decided to give the face a more organic look with eyes with pupils because many living animals have a similar shape in their eyes. This further compliments why the design is special and different from my previous artworks. The machine is powered by it's pilot's determination, guts, hard work, spirit, hopes and dreams, as well as through hot blooded motivation.
In summary, most of starck's use of metal and a brushed aluminum finish as well as his usage of streamlining and making features such as the glow on the S+ark Mouse, combined with my interest in mechanical design and giant robots from Japanese animation, eventually led to a fusion of both ideas which formed the streamlined mechanical design featured in my blog image.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I know this might have been a long read, but I am glad that you managed to read through all of it! Thank you.
No comments:
Post a Comment