New Challenges

Feb 5, 2020
4 min read

This week was very eye opening to me. I realized I do not have goals set for myself as an artist and my art in general. I feel like this is a really key thing I am missing. I don't know what I want from my art or myself besides it to be "better".

So I tried something new this week for my weekly drawing - a different art style that is more cartoonist/ stylized and utilizes line drawings. I didn't like it. I think I am going to go back to my base sketch and try to paint it more freely than line art allows. Here were my attempts. These are WIP. With just shy of 5 hours working on it.

I also decided that for the purpose of my hopes to show progressing skill with each drawing that it would be a good idea to spend the same amount of time on each piece. I am thinking right now I can aim for 10 hours each?

This week I also went through my first modules for my online character course.

It was an intro to Art Fundamentals, but surprising I learned a lot of new information. It really focused on how the story and emotion in a piece is much more important than the accuracy of the drawing. That art is just a medium what you are showing is the message. If your message, story, concept is lacking the piece will be too, no matter how talented someone is. Another key point I took away from the lesson was to make art for myself, not for others. To try and let go of what people will think, if they will like it, if its good enough, and to instead just think about what I like.

Another big topic I faced this week was the idea of Fear & Art. This is a really weak spot for me. When the instructor was talking it was enough to make me cry, so I went ahead and purchased a recommended book called Art & Fear because this is obviously a huge hang up for me, the fear of failure. I read the first few chapters, and to say it's something I needed is an understatement. I may decide to focus on this topic for my paper.

For my other classes I am trying my best to get a hang of Zbrush to get the basemesh of a character model out. It's not that great but I felt okayish with it since it is my first time modeling in this way?

The first pic is a base I started with and then sculpted to get what I have in the other pictures.These are WIP.

For my History class I put a presentation together of Surrealism in a Game.\

I chose Doki Doki Liturature club.

I think Doki Doki Literature Club is a great example for a game that has surrealism in it. This seemingly sweet and lighthearted visual novel gets more and more surreal as you progress. Part of this game has the player choosing words to create a poem. Not only is this a cool mechanic but it is full of surreal like word choices. The characters also frequently talk about the interpretations of these poems and dreams that they have in a very surreal way. These poems and dreams heavily foreshadow the future events and hint at the backstories of the characters, some are more straightforward while others seem very random and obscure.

As you continue to play the game these very unsettling and eerie glitches start to happen, starting so slight you cant exactly tell what is off (lick a characters eyes very slowly moving apart from each other) and then escalates to the text being changed, very bold, or fast, the characters portraits glitching and even images flashing quickly.

This all gives a really surreal feeling but the strongest surreal element I think is the “end” section of the game where you realize that one of the girls is sentient in the game and has been “messing” with all of the other girls character files. This breaks the 4th wall and leaves you in this very spacey dreamy room alone with the character talking to you directly as a player. She knows she’s in a game, she knows when you record, she knows if you try to mess with her save files. She has the power and deletes other girls from the game, realizes her controlling mistakes and then deletes herself out of the game, restarts your game without herself in it. Then you have a second playthrough, but her consciousness still can’t take it and she tries to delete the whole game. If you try to restore the files, she tells you that you are being cruel, and she doesn’t want to exist anymore. This whole experience is so surreal because it makes it feel like she is real and directly making changes to your computer files in the real world and it is so weird, trippy, and creepy.