Independent Project: Making Artworks

This week I began making some artworks to populate my gallery space.

I made three new 2D pieces in Illustrator which followed the art style I previously established in one of my mood boards in the project proposal. 

For the first piece, I mainly used curved shapes to create a soft and flowing design, while for the second piece I followed a more angular and sharp aesthetic. I decided to make the third piece out of squares and rectangles. 

Piece 2

Piece 1

With all my pieces, I tried to make the colour schemes unique and interesting. This was most difficult with the third piece, as I kept going back and forth with what colours I wanted. Once I had settled on a colour scheme I was alright with, I exported what I had and left it alone until the next day. Upon my return, I hada much easier time deciding on a better colour scheme. After making a few more changes to differentiate from the previous version, I proceeded to export a copy with the new colours.

Initial Version of Piece 3

Piece 3 with adjustments and alternate colours

Since it was taking a while to get these pieces done, my mother suggested I adapt some of my previous artworks. After some discussion I decided to pick specific pieces which matched with the visual style I wanted. Since most of them were from college and were therefore already a couple of years old, I felt comfortable with this decision.

During my search I was able to find about fifteen pieces that would fit well into my gallery, though for some of them, I decided to add some subtle effects, make small fixes, and perform some light clean-up.

Adding Pieces to Gallery Environment

Since I already added some picture frames to one of my gallery rooms in Blender, I chose to use it as a starting point to test how my artworks looked in the scene. The method I used to add my artworks involved creating a new material to each frame, choosing an image texture as the base colour, and selecting the artwork I wanted to be displayed. 

This resulted in the image being wrapped around the entire shape, which looked quite awkward and skewed. In order to fix this problem, I had to change the frames from cubes to flat planes and then add the solidify modifier.

At this point I decided to move on to making some 3D pieces. I started by adding objects onto one of the empty podiums in the room, while still using my mood board as a guide. 

The techniques I learned during Josh's Blender session on March 1st became very important during the making process, and I was able to create my final result much more easily than I would have weeks ago.