What is a cube? A cube is usually a building block. With its even and flat sides, we can stack them on top of one another to create massive works of varying shapes and sizes.

Cubes are typically found in games. In fact, while growing up, cubes have always played a crucial role in things that I perceive as ‘fun’ and ‘playful’.

Nowadays, there is even a game where everything is made up of cubes. Its called ‘Minecraft’ and its the game which is popular among  children nowadays.

A cube, in the eyes of minecraft, is therefore the world.

In fact, when I was a small boy, I used to have games which have lots of cubes too. One of the classics is the Super Mario Brothers video game. In the game, Mario breaks up cubes in order to get power ups and items.

A cube, in the eyes of Mario, is therefore a Surprise.

Growing up, we begin to expose ourselves to more high resolution video games. Not only do the graphics advance, but narratives and plots thickens too. In the game Portal and Portal 2, your character (Chell) experiences a simple friendship with a sentient cube. Eventually, *spoiler alert* you have to let go of this friend in order to advance. Heavier themes such as friendships starts appearing in games as we get older. Bringing an additional emotional dimension to the work.

Thus, a cube in the eyes of Chell (Portal), is a close friend.

Of course, games can come with risks too. In fact, some are bad and are discouraged. One main example is gambling. It can be quite thrilling to play a game of chance and we love the occasional adrenaline rush, however it is important that we only do it when we have more than enough, but not as a way to ‘earn money’. That’s why the choice of a refined and well to do gentleman. Gamble at leisure, not at the expense of your wealth and relationships.

A cube, in the eyes of a Gambler, is a Chance.

Even at the intellectual and scientific realm, cubes play a part in bringing the fun too. Rubric’s cubes and tetris are formal examples of games that are mostly intellectually stimulating. Every hardworking scientist or mathematician will definitely need their well deserved break every now and then.

A cube, in the eyes of a Scientist, is therefore a Challenge.

So, despite being in this world for 23 years, I still find a inclination towards fun and games. Games are part of what helped to shape my character. And cubes are what helped to shape the games. So, to the little child within all of us, a cube is a little rocket that helps us travel from one video game world to another. A never ending exploration.

Therefore, a cube, in the eyes of a gamer, is an universe.

Yeap. Thanks for your patience. And have lots of fun.

Final presentation for the project:

That’s it. For more stuff on design and references refer to the previous process posts. Thank you. 🙂

Have a great day.

KJ

Okay, so I’ve been overloading on the posts. Going to show my first round of complete works before moving on to the final.

1. Mario

Quite content with the look of this cube. Only concern was to clean up the edges. The glowing box is to show a ‘sense’ of surprise for Mario.

 

2. Minecraft

Stopped here because I thought the world felt quite complete. For the first round of completion, I have yet to include my own character, so in the meantime I used the character I found from the web. Felt a little out of place compared to the others. Personally felt that the composition is too ‘green’ so wanted to add a little contrast into the composition.

3. Gambler

This composition works but felt oddly out of place. Later decided that it was due to the variety of assets that caused the look to be weird. Compared to the others, they have blocks defining a sense of a ‘room’ or ‘space’. This composition, however, felt a little more compact and full. The huge size of the character did not help with the situation.

4. Portal (Chell)

The hardest cube to resolve. Due to the indent on the surface of the cube, it becomes difficult to place the objects on the top of the cube. As such, it became important that I flattened out the top of the cube. In order to do so, I had to connect the top edges together by introducing additional planes and resolving the curves so that the cube will appear to be more naturalistic. Below is the transformation of the cube:

Initial look of the cube.

After flattening out of the plane. The same ‘rising’ feeling of the top cube appeared again, however, with the addition of the assets, the problem was quickly resolved.

5. Scientist

Compared to the other cubes, this particular one feels exceptionally flat. Furthermore, the cube that the character is interacting with is the same as that of the bottom one, making the idea of the rubric’s cube less interesting. However was quite glad of the look, especially the way the tetris cubes situates themselves so playfully around the space.

6. Game Cube

One of my most unexpected compositions. Wanted to make the cube a planet with an observatory. But personally felt that the object looked somewhat like a rocket. Added boosters and a ‘cube sun’ to make the composition complete. Was pleasantly surprised in the way it turned out in the end. My greatest satisfaction for this composition however was the background as I did it using purely photoshop tools by referring to an online tutorial.

Compositions in general:

Some mistakes that I had to rectify for my final pieces:

1. The cubes are not centralized
2. The characters differ in size and style to drastically.
3. The lack of a cast shadow on the objects for them to exist properly in space.

Rectified these mistakes and came up with the final piece. Which will be elaborated in the next slide. One more post to go.

Have a great day,

KJ

Some design concepts that I learnt! The idea of visual tension.

Wanted to have the ambition of having floating cubes to complement the main cube. Below is a rough sketch of my idea:

The cubes are supposed to be some cube-like object that complements the main cube. Below was a sketch for the mario cube:

Proposed to have little assets floating on the brick cubes in the mario composition. However, Shirley mentioned about the possible visual tension of the work.

There are two ways the design could play out:

1. The viewer sees the cube immediately and the attention immediately shifts to the top of the cube.
2. However, with the multiple blocks floating all over the place, it causes a visual tension which might cause the viewer to be unclear of the main subject. This will in turn allow the person to spend more time exploring the image.

So two main ways the thing can work:

1. A composition that provides immediate message.
2. A composition where the viewer reads the picture slowly.

 

Had a trial run on both designs for the Mario design:

Without blocks

With the addition of the blocks, the space of the image immediately expands. The intended central focus which was supposed to be the character was shifted to the floating blocks. Personally, in order for the entire design to be more consistent, I decided to do without the floating blocks. Another huge factor that prevented me from using the second style was due to time constraints as it will require more time and effort to create more interesting assets to be able to fit with the overall designs.

The second composition would probably work better if it were just one composition that needs to be done.

However, it is quite interesting how just different elements can help to shift the entire composition and how a person perceives a piece of work.

More aware of the ‘visual tension’ idea. However probably will need to experience this phenomena a few more times before it is digested into my aesthetic sense.

Anyways, 2 more posts to go. More to come.

Have a great day,

KJ

Have a tendency to include ridiculously small details. (Bad habit or good habit? Not very sure. :x)

Anyways, for each of my cubes, I decided to add a small character on them. Below are the initial sketches for them:

Wanted a better balance on the gender so made the scientist (was mathematician then) a female. Decided to change it at the end because the design was not obvious and interesting enough.

Despite the small size, I tried as much as possible to include most of the minute details of the character. I really find fun in making all these small little objects and the small little nuances that makes these characters unique.

In order to design the characters, I used basic shapes to construct their facial features. Emphasis is being put on their head dress due to their huge heads. To ensure that they follow the direction of the grid, I first created the eyes (simple oval shapes) and warped them to the same direction of the grid. Using the eyes as a reference point, I continued to add in all the other features. When done, the characters seems to sit well on the grid.

One thing to note was that I used roughly the same shapes and pose in order to get a consistent feeling to the designs. However, the main design comes in the coloring of the parts of the body and creating the head dress/ Hair for each character.

After rendering, below are the digitalis-ed form of my characters:

1.Mario

My first design. Really loved the mustache, round nose and the hat. These iconic features made the figure easily identifiable. Really loved the round nose so decided to give the rest a round nose too. However in a more scaled down version.

2. Chell (Portal)

The hardest character to construct, but yet the most fun. Had a lot of difficulty with the the hair, trying to get a convincing pony tail. Also, the main highlight of this design is the portal gun, the main weapon for the game. With the gun alone it took me forever to make, firstly to get a sense of all the basic shapes and resolving it into the grid. The most tedious part was rendering it for it to look like the actual gun.

Closer look on the portal gun.

3. Gentleman

Liked to play around with this one. Main difficulty in creating this was the tailcoat and hat. But generally took a shorter time than the others.

4. Einstein

In terms of visually, I felt that Einstein’s funny hair and mustache is the best representation of a scientist. That was why it was modeled differently from the initial sketches. Used the pen tool to construct the hair. Quite happy with the results. Although frustrating and slow, I became more familiar with the pen tool after creating some of the assets.

5. Ah Boy

Surprisingly difficult to get the shape of the cap. Once again pushed my pen tool skills to its limit.

6. Mincraft characters: Steve and Creeper.

created the two most iconic characters of the game. Since they are made of cubes i decided to keep the person’s head a cube as well. However, still kept the roundness of the body and the position of the arms to keep the rhythm of the characters consistent.

The little creeper(green thing) was just to make the composition more lively and its actually rather fun to create this little thing.

Anyways. above are all my little characters that I am proud to make. Despite it having such a small existence within my compositions, i found myself having fun in resolving all the small details of the characters.

I also thought it would be a nice way to help give me a sense of ‘building’ characters and things which might be a relevant skill when I move on to my major in animation.

Loved this challenge. Hopefully the effort paid off.

Anyways, next step was to piece everything together. More to come.

Have a great day.

KJ

The first thing to do to get the art done is to get a grid.

Did some online research and looked at some tutorial.

In order to create a grid in Photoshop, we rasterize a square pattern that we created ourselves, rotate then squash it:

1. Create a little ‘L’ shape and save it as a pattern unit.

 

2. Fill up a new layer and apply the pattern on the top: Will yield the following results:

 

3. Rasterize the layer and rotate the layer, use the ‘transform’ tool to squash the grid. Voila! You get a grid that you can work with. All the lines are angled and are parallel to one another.

Seems straightforward but took me a while to figure this out. Quite inefficient in Photoshop.

I wanted a consistent look for all my works, so that there is a sense of rhythm within all of them. To do so, I decided to keep to the following ‘rules’

1. The central composition is the cube, which is the first object that the viewer notices.
2. There has to be a standard ‘character’ interacting within the space
3. Floating clouds that differ in look will appear in the same orientation.
4. Color of the ‘sky’ will change, however, keeping to the sky colors that you can find in games.

Worst. Rules. Ever. *Cries* Mainly, what it eventually meant was that I had 6 similar looking works but in order to achieve these 6 I had to complete 6 sets of completely different assets.

It took an entire weekend to construct all the assets in the respective cubes. Had to borrow some pictures here and there because of restrictions in time and resources.

Anyways… First step was the cubes.

Created a standard frame for my cubes on the grid so that i can construct my cubes with a consistent form and position:

With the standard cube I created the main base of the works: The respective cubes for the respective words!

Some issues that popped up during consultation:

1. The top layer of the cubes looked strangely off perspective, like the entire edge was being raised.
2. The objects were ‘floaty’, should all be localised on the top of the cubes.
3. For the game cube panel, I wanted a more ‘universe’ look, thus reccommended that i look into space references and maybe put an observatory on the top to indicate an ‘universe’.
4. Had a concern about the placement of my objects, wanted smaller cubes to float around instead of just the main cube. Had to experiment with the design and see which one works and which one does not.

With the base cubes done, it was time to move on to the main assets of the compositions. Which honestly was the part that took the most effort and time. Anyways. More to come.

Have a great day.

KJ

Did a bit more research and came up with my main idea!

One thing I’ve learnt from the previous assignment is that my techniques might come off as a little boring.

I wanted to try something that is rather unique and new to me. As a challenge.

So i decided to try something I’ve got zero experience in. Digital Isometric Art.

Isometric art basically refers to a form of art where all the objects are designed to a standard grid, thus the perspective and size of the objects are purposely distorted. However, this does not mean that the sense of space is taken away.

Some of my main references:

 

Isometric art by Ukiyo-e:

Isometric art by Monument Valley:

Screenshot of Habbo hotel:

Screen shot of Restaurant City:

 

After research, it occurred to me that most of isometric art comes from games! One of the main observations that I had was that the objects of the ‘space’ helps to embellish the artwork and always serve as the point of interests.

More importantly, I noticed that cubes generally the basic building blocks within the isometric grid.

So there we have it my main object: Cubes.

Had to find 6 objects that are cube related, it was much more straightforward than the lighter:

1. Building block in minecraft
2. Companion cube in portal 2
3. Surprise cube in mario
4. Rubric’s cube
5. Dice
6. Game cube

Generally the first 3 are from video games. In fact, the 6 words are related to the idea of ‘GAMING’ or ‘PLAY’ mainly to fit the ‘game’ theme that isometric art usually appear in.

Of course, not all 6 objects exist isometrically, that was why I had to research on the look of the 6 items. Below are some more significant references:

1. Minecraft

2. Portal

3. Mario:

4. Rubric’s cube:

5. Dice:

6. Game cube

 

So next was the experimental and torturous journey of trying to achieve the look that I set out to do. Decided to use Photoshop as my main medium to create my works. Worst decision ever. *Laughs*. More to come.

Have a great day.

KJ

Another project, another entirely new ideas to come up with.

An idea that was initially developed and dropped eventually.

In the point of view of: Lighters

Main inspiration came from the idea that Lighters can be used in many ways because of the flames it produced.

Explored the object as a character and its relation to other objects.

Tried to explore some sketches:

A MATCH in the eyes of a lighter is a RIVAL

A CIGARETTE in the eyes of a lighter is a BESTFRIEND

A CANDLE in the eyes of a lighter is a lover.

Used pastel for the smokey colors for the sketches. Personally felt that they were not well rendered and that the negative spaces were far too significant. Although others found the idea quite interesting. Which I am grateful for.

Decided to do more research and see whether I can come up with better works.

However, of the ideas that I came up with, I liked the idea of Lighters serving as ‘stars’: a CONCERT in the eyes of a lighter is a STARRY SKY.

No sketches, just inspiration:

Thought the idea of a ‘night sky’ is really pretty. Decided to use it as one of my ideas for my final pieces.

That’s an idea that kinda got looked after but dropped due to its simple limits.

Moving on to my main one.

Have a great day.

KJ