This is my attempt at trying to make a zine with the minimal material I had. I think that my strong design values probably blocked any attempt i had at tying a style over design kind of thing with it but if i had been designing it normally it would of looked much different.
The zine format is weird, everything that I looked at in regard to fashion just screamed that they were trying to hard to be different or unique which i guess is the point of this kind of fashion but as a person i’ve never understood it.
I decided to go with black and white because the UCA classroom didn’t really allow for much colour to pop out, plus autumn outfits are mainly black. I do think that the black and white looks alright for what it is however, and its definitely not the first zine to take advantage of these kinds of things.
Hopefully if I ever have to do something like this again the people i would be working with would be a lot more collaborative. Especially when it came to letting me take pictures and interviews but you have to work with what you are given in these circumstances. I do have another version of this with some mocked up Q&A and some lorem ipsum filler but it felt too fake so i ditched it.
Hong Kong Film maker Wong Kar-Wai is known for his high stylised films ( In collaboration with Christopher Doyle ) such as Chungking Express, 2046 and more recently The Grandmaster, a film showing the early periods of the infamous Ip-man.
Heatherwick is a English designer who is the founder of Heatherwick studio, responsible for creating the London 2012 Olympic torch, the new Routemaster buses as well as many other notable structures.
The fine art rotation didn’t really work for us at first, nor was it what I expected to be doing at this point of the year to be perfectly honest. For the first week I was focused on trying to work out how we would get something out of these 2 weeks as a creative technology media course.
I expected fine art to be about oils and other more classic mediums which I was actually rather excited about as I have never gotten to try that style of painting. But I did find it interesting to learn about how many other styles of fine art there were other than just fine art photography, sculpture and painting.
The concept behind creating a fine art piece is interesting and I could see how its very important for artists to understand stand the context however as a designer it goes against everything you are taught. It would be so hard to incorporate fine art principles into UI design for example.
More photo glitching work. The top was made exclusively in photoshop whilst the bottom image was an image off artstation thrown into audacity and messed around with before converting it back into an image.
I wasn’t in today but on the project brief it said about photo editing or ‘hacking’ as it was put. Over the years of photoshop use I have accumulated a wide enough skill range to easily and quickly edit photos however i like them. With this work I realised that I hadn’t done any kind of VHS/80s inspired edits in a while so i took an old baby photo of me and old pictures of my little brother and messed around with them a little and used a lot of overlay layers and levels to get to the final images.
Generally the process i used to achieve this was trial and error, especially with the latter image as that was just testing out what worked well to kind of get the trippy VHS style i was looking for. It mainly consisted of getting the level of noise and the scanlines right to create the desired grainy overlay effect.
http://artoftheglitch.tumblr.com/ This art blog is probably where i get most of my inspiration for these kinds of edits. I really enjoy how he does it entirely analogue which makes his work really authentic, and if I had the equipment to set it up I would probably do it as well.
Obviously however the main inspiration for this kinda edits are the nostalgia of sitting in front of a huge tv watching movies on VHS and the crackling of the static on the screen. Combining that with old pictures is a really interesting way to look back on your past actually as its too nostalgic elements, when times were much different than they are currently.
I started to draft up a design that I decided I wanted to be dedicated to the final frontier, which is space obviously. I quickly came up with some ideas and this is my favourite from them. The plan was that if I had more time I would be able to make a quick low poly untextured model of this design and use that to be photobashed into different images of places. But I didnt have the time so I just ended up with some quick sketches in my sketchbook and this.
So for today ( Friday 16th ) we got tasked with designing a piece of public art. As soon as i heard this i decided i wanted to do something which represented something, almost memorial like whilst still being aesthetically pleasing.
Due to being more focused on areas like design i started looking at things like parasitic architecture and monuments as they are things that i can understand better.
Examples of parasitic architecture:
Examples of Monuments:
These are just some of my favourite monuments and parasitic architecture examples that id look at representing.
Some of the topics I would consider would be…
The sacrifice in the pursuit of technology - The Cost of the Future
For this idea i was thinking of an idea of parasitic art, built onto an iconic building.
Augmentation and Human evolution - Humanity Divided
For this I was thinking about using too arms sticking out of somewhere grasping out in a direction.
The ideal of Soldiers and what they fight for - Sins of a father
For this one id want the evolution of warriors throughout history, starting with a caveman drawing and the figures slowly moving out from the wall.
Im going to go and take photos and then come up with some ideas of what to do in regards to the art interacting with the environment.
The work that we did in the first week of Fine art.
We made a cardboard hand sculpture and then we decided to film it and see what we could do with it in photoshop. Everyone else did the hands so i decided to painstakingly animate the background to look like it was a current beeping between points.
We also did a collaborative wall art piece and some continuous line portraits which were interesting to say the least.
Fine art is created to specifically be for aesthetic purposes and to be rated on its beauty and has no practical nature unlike the applied arts. Whilst I do think that fine art has a place philosophy wise when applied to something that more relates to me I.e concept art, i still think that practically its something that is very far away from what I’m looking to achieve in my more preferred area of work.
I looked into the difference between fine art and graphic design to start and see where i could draw comparisons and differences. Fine art is a very personal piece of work that draws from an artists emotions and other factors whilst design work usually comes from the need to create for something, whether its a logo, flier or some other kind of design based worked that is meant to be easily interpreted.
Thats why i think its better for me to draw my comparisons between concept art and fine art. Concept art is an applied art that is designed to communicate to an audience what kind of aesthetic and world your project is going for whether it be a game or movie. These are a critical visual tool for helping the directors of these projects understand how they want their vision to be, giving them a visual and aesthetic guide for the duration of the project.
For reference, here is a comparison between a fine art cityscape and a applied arts cityscape:
Work by Hsin-Yao Tseng, a fine artist.
Here we see a really nice painting, i captures the atmosphere of a wet street at night, lit up by street lights however it doesn’t communicate much else as is usual with fine arts.
A cityscape by Gary Jamroz Palma for the game Remember Me
This is the huge sprawling layout of Neo-Paris, its designed to show the huge class divide between the city and the outer areas by utilisation of a huge wall blocking out the less fortunate is is seen quite commonly in other cyberpunk media. The art has a very clear message about what its trying to communicate aesthetic wise and for building the world.
They both communicate atmosphere in their own way yet due to fictitious nature of concept art the breadth of the world is explored more in the concept art. This differs greatly from fine art which is very much more based in reality and requires you to interpret and think about it more.
Fine art is also very wide however as it also incorporates things such as sculpture and performance however these also run along the same veins as being just for aesthetic and beauty purposes, whilst its equivalents in applied arts are probably 3d modelling and animation.
I think fine art is really interesting and is a core part of art in a whole but past that i feel like its influence rapidly drops off the further away you get from a paintbrush. Basic design principles compared to fine art principals don’t mesh well but i can still see how they could each bounce of each other.
For reference, some other notable concept art pieces that straddle the line between art and a functional piece of work.
*Additional Note
Matte painting is the profession of creating backgrounds and settings for movies that would be impossible to film, though not commonly used now days, this was a profession that clearly jumped between fine art and applied arts as the more realistic the painting the more seamless it would appear to the viewer. This illusion was important until cgi become sufficiently cheap enough to create the backgrounds.
