Development of the first mini project

I'm carrying on with the frontier theme but still leaning towards the side of setting it during the second half once the civil war was over and more development and civilisation what around. This is because I feel like it will allow me to do more original paintings. I want to try to keep away from the more Hollywood style of the west and focus on a more accurate depiction that I imagine to be alot darker and more of a struggle for survival. This also links to why I want the designs to be set later on when there were more pockets of civilisation and law spread through the land as thinking about it in a game format the player would need safe areas away from the wilderness to help with the pacing.

My goal this week was to improve on an area that I felt my last piece was lacking in. I created a painting of an oil tower on fire but it lacked drama. After looking at the painting I discovered that it was due to how ordinary the set up was in relation to the feeling I was trying to capture. The oil tower was set up neatly framed in the middle with a flat horizon line. These things aren't a bad thing to have in paintings but they didn't fit this theme as they made it feel safe and controlled.

(original) 

 

(revised)

I've quickly made one adjustment to just disrupt the horizontal safe feeling lines by just rotating and cropping the image. There's still a lot more that needs to be done to capture the right feeling I was hoping for with this piece but I think this helps make it feel a little more wild and dramatic. It would be better if I worked a third point of perspective into this painting when creating it to give the tower a larger scale that would then effectively make the fire feel more powerful. This would also mean the camera placement would be lower allowing the viewer to look up at the tower and the figure which would also make it more dramatic.

So I knew I had to take these things into consideration when painting the next piece that can be seen above (chase scene). I wanted to paint a dramatic concept where all these rules would still apply in order to learn from. the fist thing I did was to sketch out the image first this time so that I could push it further with how dynamic it looked. I'd purchased a video tutorial from John J Park about key framing. In this tutorial he talks about different camera angles and would sketch different variations the scene he'll be painting in order to find the best one. They start out more tame and eventually he finds an exiting way of looking at the image through developing the sketches. This tutorial helped visualise the problems I was having with my previous piece of work and allowed me to spot the changes I could make with the next one. I made sure I didn't have a flat horizon line cutting through my image as I wanted the camera to be on a tilt giving it a look of drama. I also made sure the values where strong giving the image more of contrast between the foreground and background. Lastly learning from the oil tower I didn't want everything to fit nicely into the frame. The character in the foreground doesn't fit completely in frame and is at an angle. I wanted the image to capture a scene from a chase sequence so this helped give the image that look.

I think there was an overall improvement in comparison to my last piece. However I still think I could have pushed it further by having the camera be placed lower to make it more dramatic.

   

The second piece I did this week I wanted to focus more on story telling. I know this world I'm painting is set after the civil war and I've been looking at a place called Deadwood which was a settlement placed in the middle of Native territory because the area was rich in gold. Attacks happened frequently through gorilla style fighting and the Union was sent to protect the people eventually after a battle was fought and lost between the settlers and the natives.

So this piece shows a union cavalry man checking up on a gold panning location but on arrival discovers that it's been attacked and the victims scalped and shot with arrows. Scalping was done by the natives as a trophy to show their victory and also as a fear tactic. I tried to work in story telling elements into the piece but overall I'm not that happy with the overall execution of the piece. It feels boring. I want more of a contrast in colour and through all the details I tried to put in I think it made the image feel muddy. I guess it could be considered useful in order to show an environment layout to a designer but it doesn't capture what I wanted it to and I feel like this is because its overly complicated and lacks a variety of colour.

I think my next goal is to re visit this theme of an attack but make it a lot simpler and try to make it pop with colour a bit more but to still maintain a dark feeling that something terrible has happened.