Majority of our projects this year rely on group work, which is why it's important for the three in our group to start thinking of ideas to bring to the table. To help us think, we took a trip with some other media courses up to London to the National Gallery. The purpose of this trip was to try and capture our imaginations and help us brainstorm the kind of art style we wanted in our game.
When we arrived at the National Gallery, the three of us VFX students decided to loosely stick together as we walked around the Gallery. This also gave us a few opportunities to converse about any ideas we had regarding the game project. Here are some pictures I took on Route A, which held biblical and renaissance pieces. Many of these were giant and filled entire walls.
Cade and I had a few conversations, one in which he suggested that we create a puzzle game in which you have to unscramble a painting, which we could source from the gallery. I liked this idea a lot, which spurred me on to look at a wider variety of paintings.
Here are some of my favourite pieces from Route A, which I like for various different reasons. I liked some of these because of how fabics and clothing (such as veils and wimples) were shaped and shaded. The style of how fabric ruffles, bunches and drapes was something I really liked, so I made sure to take pictures of a lot of those.
Another reason I liked some of these is because of how they are framed and composed. Many of these paintings have been laid out to tell a story, with aspects framed in corners of the images. The poses of some of the characters and figures in the scenes are also quite dramatic and straight to the point, which helps convey the stories each of these paintings tell. The layouts of some of the paintings also remind me of Tarot cards, which also have to convey meaning.
Some of the frames of these paintings and how they're presented play a factor in my like for them. Some paintings are giant and have unique frames that the scenes have been painted onto, some almost looking like windows. This is something that I found really unique, and is something I'd be interested in trying out in some of my art as well.
Since Room 28 was recommended to us VFX students, we decided to go down Route B. Route B was still filled with biblical inspired paintings, but the style has changed to be more realistic instead of surreal like on Route A. Many of the paintings held a softer, illustrative style, which was most commonly seen in Rembrandt. Another artist I liked was Peter Paul Rubens, who has a similar soft style.
Here are some of my favourites from Route B, which I like for a multitude of reasons. I appriciated some of these pieces for sticking with more realistic framing and setting, but I liked others for being more surreal like the ones in Route A. I really liked the bright colours used in many of the biblical pieces, and how some archetecture was simplified to to draw the eye towards the figures in the scene.
I also enjoyed viewing the many landscape paintings, which were commonly of dockyards. I liked how the time of day was apparent from the clours used for highlighing and the sky, which conveyed that these paintings were set at dawn and sunset.
Here are some images from Room 28, which was filled with incredibly photorealistic paintings of flowers and table settings. Going back to the idea that Cade came up with, using these paintings as the puzzle would be a good way to keep things simple as well as incorporate everything we've learnt from this trip.
Before leaving, there was an exhibition of Bellotto's landscape paintings. I decided to have a quick look before I finally called it a day.
Here are his landscape paintings. I really love how he's painted two pictures of the same mountainous region from two separate angles. I also like that he put people in his scenes, which really brings the painting to life, and gives the world he's captured a lively feeling.
As a small ending to the National Gallery trip, I sat in Trafalgar Square and drew some of the things I saw. The fountain is somewhat unfinished, but I enjoyed attempting to draw the spraying water and trying to conmmunicate how it falls over the side of the fountain.
That concludes the trip we took to the National Gallery. Since we're VFX students, we decided that we wanted to do something else in London. We ended up going to a shop called Forbidden Planet, which held a large assortment of figurines, collectables, books, and board games from a wide variety of genres. This gave us the opportunity to look at the types of things that companies use to market their products, and also to look at other board games relevant to the editing project of this year.
This trip has not only had me appriciating centuries-old art, but also more modern interpretations to the same themes and ideas.
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