happy accidents
Exploring Creativity 28.10
Einar held a lecture on “applied imagination” today. It was short but informative and interesting, touching upon some stuff I find to be really cool. Einar mentioned for instance the “Rorschach inkblot test” (a method of psychological evaluation) emphasizing the implied shapes that we make up to be something in our own minds. Example below.
He continued talking about concept art, in video games for instance. I love cool concept art myself and so thought it was great fun to actually have a lecture on it. We were shown some concept art from the Playstation 2 game “Shadow of the colossus”. The game itself being very conceptual in many ways, the art in this case also suited very well for this particular lecture. Contrary to a lot of concept art that clearly expresses its intended characters/environments (which we were also shown), the art from colossus on the other hand showed some great suggesting environments. Check out a couple of examples below:
We then watched a Gnomon tutorial video by guru illustrator/concept artist/designer Scott Robertson. In his video “creating unique environments” Scott demonstrates what he calls the “happy accident” method. He starts off by quickly drawing several completely random and abstract marker sketches and scanning them. He then layers them over each other using different layer and blending modes, opacity, etc. The next step is zooming into the image and finding portions of the image which might imply some sort of…well anything actually, but usually environments or something. Finding random stuff on the zoomed-in image, Scott would start drawing on top of the implicit shapes and creating environment concept art, and also a couple of characters and several spaceships… A few screenshots from the video below:
It is easy to see similarities between the different stuff we were shown, everything from Rorschach to Robertson. It was now our turn to try out the happy accident technique. The task was to create characters and/or environments based on happy accident methods. I only had time to do one Photoshop composition based on a few abstract marker sketches. It turned out “okay” I guess, with a few cool elements. It was my first time trying this stuff out though, so I guess that’s my excuse ;)
Anyway, the method itself was really fun to do! For me it was like a completely new method, and I can’t say I have done anything very similar before. Also I have never really had much of a thing for abstract art, but I love how the randomness and the abstract sketches in this particular method are utilized to create new cool stuff. Of course a finished concept art drawing would require a lot more photoshopping and much more time, but this technique can potentially send you off to a great start! My photoshop composition and some of the sketches it is made from below:
