#recycling old art poses for background practice | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

nint3ndraw · 6 years

Photo

Preorders for the Invincible Camus/archetype fanzine ( @invinciblezine ) are done (at least for now) and we’ve been given the okay to share our pieces! I contributed a sticker and an artwork for my husbando Camus!! I drew and painted the full piece first and then used the techniques I developed on that to paint the sticker. :D

This was truly a work of love, and of testing my personal art limits. My abbreviated workflow and thought process below the cut (if anyone’s curious):

Full piece:

I knew instantly that I wanted to draw Camus with an angel motif because “rumor has it that [he comes back from near-death so much that he] is watched over by a guardian angel” (blame my days in FERP, RPing with @gradiivus). Precisely how I wanted to display that idea changed a lot in the first days of this project--for instance, there was originally going to be an actual angel figure where the cape-wings are now (and that angel was going to be Nyna because Shadow Dragon was my first game, but rules were no shipping or implications of); and the pose was originally going to be front-view with very little thought to background design, let alone using background as composition element. Then I experimented with the pose, figures, and composition (because something just wasn’t sitting right with the first versions), and voila!

At first, I was torn between Camus’s FEH (favorite and the easiest to reference), FE:SD (nostalgia), and BSFE sprite (unique) designs. Not only did we have to choose different designs for multi-game characters, I also knew the white cape of his BSFE sprite would lend itself best to the wings effect I wanted. My only real reference was a tiny sprite, so I additionally based my design off Camus’s old fullbody BSFE art and some elegant (Baroque? just FEH-like?) designs pulled from memory. I had so much fun making beautiful bishie hair, beautiful clothing designs, and huge, elegant wings, despite the extra time it took to digi-line them. (Even though I‘m much better with my Wacom (Intuos) now, I still always start my drawings in pencil because sometimes I’m too AFK and poses are “easier” to fix on paper in my head.) Time flies when you’re having fun, right? But the real joy here was painting everything and pushing the limits of my painting skills. I learned several new techniques here, played with so many different brushes, and also got a reminder of how I need to use higher-contrast values orz. This and my FE Compendium piece are some of the only digital pieces I’ve ever done where I actually gave a damn about how the background looked (mainly due to lack of practice--I tend to do “studio” pieces with zero background more often), and I think it really paid off! The back- and foreground elements together really make this piece pop--I can’t believe I initially thought to go without them!

Altogether, this piece only took about... a week to finish? Definitely under 10 days. This is the fastest full piece I’ve ever finished, and I’m still so happy with it, it’s currently my phone wallpaper. If anyone ever starts a fanzine that involves Camus or Nyna, please hit me up, because (time pending) I am definitely in~

Sticker:

I knew instantly (again) that I wanted to make it chibi-style, and having come somewhat recently off the first Camus Revival GHB and having my initial sticker plans blown by posting my entire Camus bust ahead of schedule, I thought, “Why not make it Heroes-style”? Camus canonically wields swords and lances in Shadow Dragon and New Mystery and he already wields a the lance in Heroes, so I knew I had to go with the other weapon. Never mind that swords are the most overused weapon class in FE. Camus nearly never smiles in his (canon) depictions, but I figured a >:O face would be much cuter. And of course, since my full piece used my BSFE design, I decided to recycle the design onto the chibi. This piece only took me a day or two to finish, and it turned out super cute! Way better than the bust I was originally going to go with, even if this is a pain to cut precisely XD

#invinciblezine #fe11 #fe12 #feh #camus #fire emblem #shadow dragon #nintendraw #bsfe #Fire emblem shadow dragon #fire emblem heroes #finally i can share this beautiful thing!!#if anyone wants to see the original pose ideas reply here or send ask

15 notes · View notes

micaramel · 4 years

Link

Artist: Derek Fordjour

Venue: Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, St. Louis

Exhibition Title: Derek Fordjour: SHELTER

Date: January 17 – August 23, 2020

Curated by: Wassan Al-Khudhairi, Misa Jeffereis

Click here to view slideshow

Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, St. Louis

Press Release:

Derek Fordjour: SHELTER presents multiple bodies of work that explore issues of race, identity, aspiration, and inequality. Fordjour’s Player Portraits line the Project Wall, forming a procession toward the exhibition’s entryway. Each portrait, from a series of 100, is made through the artist’s signature process of layering and tearing, painting and repainting. Fordjour employs and recycles humble materials—cardboard, newspaper, charcoal—making reference to the hand-me-downs that were passed along to relatives in Ghana, and the wear and tear of buildings he inhabited as a child in Memphis, Tennessee. The notion of making something out of nothing, and the dignity found in making something old new again, are themes evident in Fordjour’s material process.

SHELTER is a site-specific installation that resembles a ramshackle structure composed of corrugated metal walls, dirt floor, and a sound piece that mimics the effect of rain striking a tin roof. We are placed at the heart of a storm. With detritus culled from the urban environment, the installation creates a place of safety amidst crisis and impending harm. SHELTER reminds us of the unstable conditions in which art is often made and of human migrations across the earth, the millions seeking shelter from a multiplicity of storms. Vulnerability is central to Fordjour’s work, and the unsteadiness of dirt underfoot reinforces the funhouse effect of his portraits and sculptures. Hanging in this makeshift environment are Fordjour’s scenes. Fordjour uses the metaphor and pageantry of sport as a way of considering questions of marginalization and inequity in America. The artist’s paintings explore both the vulnerability and strategy required of individuals as they navigate legacies of injustice and socio-political bias. Cheerleaders in splits, drum majors in backbends, athletes posing in awkward groups—these paintings convey an uneasy feeling of display and exposure. The artist sheds light on the pressures of exceptionalism and performance, while questioning the extent to which trailblazing figures are truly able to disrupt patterns of longstanding systemic inequality in the US.

The surface of Fordjour’s paintings defy the labor of their making. Over many years of experimentation, the artist developed his unique painting process using humble materials, chosen for their affordability: charcoal, newspaper, and cardboard. To make his paintings, the artist begins by creating a base layer made up of tiled colored paper on canvas. Fordjour then wraps the canvas in newspaper and tears away at the surface to create an interaction between the layers. This process is repeated several times before Fordjour adds small pieces of paper to the surface, on top of which he paints the subject. Using spray paint, charcoal, oil pastel, and acrylic to create the figures, the final painting alternately conceals and reveals underlying layers to create a rich, textured surface. The repair and disrepair of the canvas reflects the conditions of abandonment and scarcity present in the artist’s upbringing in the South. There is also a sense of beauty inherent in the act of breathing new life into the old. Fordjour’s vibrant color palette takes cues from his experience growing up in the South, his exposure to Americana and Pop, and from such specific items as candy wrappers, African fabrics, and athletic team colors.

Fordjour’s series Worst to Be First refers to the notion of “firsts” as markers of societal achievement. As desirable as it is to be the first African American to achieve recognition in a chosen field, the experiences of isolation, heightened pressure, and performance are daunting. Fordjour highlights the competitive nature ingrained in our societal structures, which invariably validates notions of injustice. This series is rooted in the artist’s lived experience, personal history, and shared narrative of family members, colleagues, and friends. In Worst to Be First II (2019) Fordjour pictures a military figure holding an object of significance in a nighttime landscape. By suppressing individual features of any specific person, Fordjour invokes multiple narratives referencing a legacy of military achievement among men of color. The everyman quality of his portraits is a strategic effort to connect many historical narratives.

Rally Finale (2017) is part of the artist’s crowd painting series, in which figures are rendered in iconographic terms—tightly arranged in a composition free of background or foreground. Fordjour’s crowd paintings have two functions, both formal and conceptual. Formally, he finds inspiration from particular moments when multiple figures form a dense crowd in paintings. He consciously looks to works like Jacob Lawrence’s The Migration Series, Panel no.1, Renoir’s Bal du moulin de la Galette, and Archibald J. Motley Jr.’s Blues for compositional inspiration. He then sketches a loosely constructed tessellation, a form of tiling within a picture plane made popular by M.C. Escher.

Conceptually, the interlocking patterns evoke intimate social patterns and systems that reveal the interconnectedness of communities and cultures. In crowd series paintings like Rally Finale, the figures are squeezed into a chock-a-block formation. The closeness of the figures reveals a tension between difference and sameness. The connectedness and relation of people to one another is undeniable. Each figure overlaps another regardless of race, social class, bias, or political preference.

This particular work was created in early 2017 as a response to the transition from the Obama to the Trump administration, a time of political upheaval and unrest, and during the peak moments of a changing of the guard.

More recently Fordjour has been working collaboratively by constructing large-scale, immersive installations that combine the distinct arms of his practice: painting, sculpture, and sound. The artist often situates visitors in precarious environments where the very elements of construction—a dirt floor, for example—throw audiences off-balance. In 2015 Fordjour presented UPPER ROOM, replete with a loose crushed stone floor, based on a prayer room his mother maintained at home, where Christian hymns resonated on the interior of the sculpture while sounds from an NYC police scanner played on the exterior. The resulting tension between the two sounds reveal the desperation of a mother seeking refuge and safety for her three black sons through faith.

The artist’s installations are rooted in personal history that also refer to larger narratives—in this case, by exposing his mother’s ritual seeking of solace from the threat of police violence for her sons, he also engages larger questions of personal safety in public spaces and the uncertainty of finding refuge.

Fordjour’s 2019 installation STOCKROOM Ezekiel honors the life of Ezekiel Archey, a convict laborer who worked under Alabama’s brutal convict leasing program. In the late 19th century, condemned criminals were sentenced to work without compensation in coal mines, steel plants, and molasses distilleries. About this installation Fordjour explains, “I’m thinking a lot about incarceration and my own experiences with the criminal justice system, and growing up in the 90s and seeing the crack era, and where we are now with sentencing.” With its dirt floors and barbed-wire fencing, STOCKROOM Ezekiel points to the tragic persistence of injustice that defines American life for black and brown people.

Derek Fordjour (b. 1974, Memphis, Tennessee) has exhibited at Night Gallery, Los Angeles; the Brooklyn Academy of Music; and Josh Lilley Gallery, London, among other venues. He has received commissions for public projects from the Whitney Museum Billboard Project and from the Metropolitan Transit Authority of New York City for a permanent installation at the 145th Street Subway Station in Manhattan. He was the 2016 Sugarhill Museum Artist-in-Residence, a resident of the 2017 Sharpe Walentas Studio Program in New York City, and was awarded the 2018 Deutsche Bank NYFA Fellowship. He frequently serves as a lecturer at institutions and as a Core Critic at Yale University School of Art. His work is held in collections throughout the United States and Europe, including the Studio Museum in Harlem; Perez Art Museum, Miami; Brooklyn Museum of Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Fordjour is a graduate of Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, and earned a Master’s Degree in Art Education from Harvard University and an MFA in painting from Hunter College.

Link: Derek Fordjour at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis

from Contemporary Art Daily https://bit.ly/3l37UHG

#micaramel

0 notes

symbianosgames · 7 years

Link

The Silver Case is the first game Grasshopper Manufacture ever made. Before Killer 7, before No More Heroes, before Let it Die, The Silver Case showed what GHM would become. A studio where story and visual flair were paramount.

It's an adventure game, in the visual novel style of classics like Snatcher, but with a more realistic setting, posed as a hard boiled crime story. It was originally released on the PlayStation in 1999, only in Japan, the only original Grasshopper Manufacture game with that distinction. That's why the recent PC port, called The Silver Case HD Remaster, is exciting – it brings the entire original Grasshopper catalog into English.

To dig into what makes this game special, we spoke with some of the developers of the game, original and new, discussing character design, story, and the port itself.

What influenced your design style here?

Takashi Miyamoto: The story is set in 1999, but there was an inclusion of near future aspects which came from the writings of William Gibson. Additionally, numerous films have also influenced the design.

Which films? How did they influence the design?

TM: What I remembered from your question is Metropolis, Gattaca, Heat, or Seven. But these answers don't mean I was influenced regarding the character design, it's more like the overall image including the background or scenes.

Of course all those films, since my childhood, are accumulated into my core, but I really don't think I got any direct influence about the character design from them, at least that's what I remember.

However, Suda told me that Morikawa and Kotobuki could look like characters appearing in the Japanese television series Taiyo ni hoero. I didn't search for the actual photos or videos, so still everything is made from my imagination.

Why do you think there's a more western style prominent in detective style visual novels?

TM: Perhaps it would be in the interest or longing to the culture totally different from our own. Also, it might be difficult to make up something new from the cities you've grown up in, I guess.

I’ve never played an adventure game other than “The Silver Case,” though, so I have no idea how many games with Western settings are there or such.

What impressed me long ago was the stylish UI. Was this an iterative process getting there, and can you describe the process?

TM: At the time, the game was made with such a small team; I think the staff’s sensitivity to it was displayed in a straightforward style. The mood of the visual becomes complete with the inclusion of my art and it had to be up to the story to work. I myself was able to sink in the story and it was very comfortable.

Tell me about your most important pillars of character design. How do you craft someone unique, and bring their personality forward?

TM: I avoid the expressions and poses of common symbolic emotions that Japanese animation and manga uses, unless there is a good reason to. At my core, I always want to design characters with a back-story, and I think that suited Suda’s demand for characters at the time.

Can you give some examples of how a character's backstory influenced their character design?

TM: As far as I remember, the process of those character designs were something like; Suda shows me a fashion magazine for the costumes, and explains to me each one’s personalities, then I’d imagine the background (it's not told in the game).

Once my imagination is ready, I’d get the OK from Suda and start drawing and so on. So, no one knows about all those processes other than me and Suda. I guess Suda was doing something similar with the scenarios since he was working on it at the same time.

When writing a detective story, how close do you stick to tropes of the genre?

Masahi Ooka: I personally like to defy tropes, but in the case of The Silver Case I was actually going for a “hard-boiled” story instead of a detective one. I remember writing the story with the mind set of making the writing as “hard-boiled” as possible.

How would you distinguish between a detective story and a hard-boiled one?

MO: The book that rings a bell with the term "hard-boiled" is the Philip Marlowe series by Raymond Chandler. Also Robert Brown Parker is a favorite, too. If you say "detective story," that would be the "Sherlock Holmes" series. In Japan, there is a detective story series called Akechi Kogorou written by Ranpo Edogawa. When I was still in my early teens, I loved detective and mystery stories. Then in my late teens, I was into Sci-Fi novels. Finally in my twenties, the hard-boiled genre came up as a choice among other mystery novels.

That might be why I feel "detective story" and "hard-boiled" are different genres. So in short, there is a big genre called "mystery," and within that, "detective story" is just one category, then another category called "hard-boiled" exists inside my head.

The difference? The writing style, the air, the reasoning and action of the protagonist, I guess. The heroes of hard-boiled stories are all tough, merciless, and stylish. Well, in the era of Robert Brown Parker, those heroes became more humane and somewhat unstylish, I should say. (The game's second protaginist) Tokio Morishima, of course, fulfills my aesthetics but he is a character who is a little unstylish and "poorly-made."

How is it collaborating with other writers? Do you take charge of a certain aspect, like dialog, or do you write whatever and edit each other, or something else?

MO: With the cooperation of Suda, I will receive the scenario once he completes it; we will have a meeting in regards to the scenario, confirm what will be covered in Placebo, and then finally start writing the story. We also had help from the writer Kato Sako, who we also met up with at a café, giving out ideas and then writing the story. As a journalist, I would usually write after an interview, write after research or write with an editor. So The Silver Case was written as an extension of that practice. Of course, there were also times I’ve submitted the scenario and fixed the script so it matches the overall story.

When writing a story like this, do you ever find yourself trapped in your own logic? Sometimes when I write, I have a great idea, and then I realize it contradicts other things I've already put in place. How do you deal with this?

MO: Yes, of course, I was occasionally trapped. The Silver Case is a piece of work which presents the seems-to-be logical answer but creates inconsistency at the same time, and then someone comes up with a new piece of logic from another perspective but it also produces a different inconsistency... it keeps going on like this and ends up with just a chaotic situation. So, sometimes I had to think about "What is the logical consistency anyway?" That was just tough. Or quite simply, there might be some inconsistencies left over intentionally, you know.

Apart from The Silver Case, "logic" is a mere element to construct a story. It is the same even for mystery which has a strong weight upon logic. It is true that if the story has any inconsistency, that might make the user stop following it, but if the work has something more important than keeping the consistency, it is author's choice to prioritize the inconsistency, this is what I think. If any of us come up with brilliant idea, we should rely on that rather than try to make something look good. I prefer a "marvelous idea with some inconsistency" rather than a "logical consistency." Of course we need to balance them well though.

Yes, the balance. A so-called masterpiece is something with a good balance which includes logical consistency. However, that well-balanced piece could be interesting but boring, no one knows. What I like is something that pretends to have the layers of logical ideas and just destroys everything in the end, something that seems to be made upon the unreal logic. Well, it's hard to describe.

Saying that, I, myself am a very bad story writer. Please someone teach me how to create an interesting story.

Is there anything you've changed from the original game, or anything you wish you could?

MO: For me it’s the norm to feel embarrassed at my own past writing, so I don’t really like to read it once it’s written. If I were to start fixing the text, I would probably rewrite the whole thing. However, Placebo was something I’ve written a considerably long time ago and I don’t really remember the fine details of it. So it’s probably going to feel like someone else had written it. Well since I haven’t touched the script in over a decade, I don’t think I would have the urge to change it.

I'm sure you didn't plan for this game to be translated into English from the start? Is there anything that has surprised you about the localization process?

MO: I wouldn’t have even dreamed that The Silver Case would be released in English. Being totally honest, I’m surprised that people still even remember it as a game. Kind of like the living dead. I’ve got no clue how the English audience will receive the game. Suda’s scenarios would likely be accepted outside of Japan, but I’m worried that people might not get what’s going on in Placebo haha.

Looking back at old code, was there anything embarrassing there? Anything you fixed up?

Yuki Yamazaki: To be honest, I still don’t know all of it. We’re rebuilding the source code from scratch, recycling fine algorithms and parameters from the original source.

Can you talk about how you're rebuilding the code base? And with those old algorithms and such, do you feel the need to improve them?

YY: For the basic functions like audio/movie playback or fade-in/out of the screen, I just ignored the original algorithm and designed it so that we can easily use it. Contrary to that, I painstakingly tried to keep the original design for the “film window system” to preserve the coordinated decision or movement timing decision algorithms.

What I had difficulty with was that very original message display system. There was an automatic page break function which worked only a couple times throughout the whole game, so I was checking the code each time with thinking “Do I have to use this ‘automatic’ system? Can we just do this manually?” Then in the end, that function became totally different from the original algorithm and I just ended up regretting my decision to edit that “automatic page break” function from the start.

Did you port to a modern engine, or modify the original?

YY: We are using the latest Unity engine. Using an engine from 17 years ago was out of the question.

What has been updated for modern platforms? How did you deal with aspect ratio issues, et cetera?

YY: We pretty much remade the game from the ground up. For the aspect ratio, were trying to make the “Film Window” functional in a 4:3 environment. We decided not to change anything like forcefully stretching the image.

What are the challenges of working with an old code base?

YY: Since we didn’t have the original data, I’ve decided to make a converter that extracts the sound data from the PlayStation sound data. However since the format is so old and so little of it, it was quite difficult.

Can you go into detail about the PlayStation sound converter?

YY: The sound file for PlayStation had two separate types of music data; pitch data and the musical score data, which is rather similar to MIDI files.

Adding to that, for The Silver Case, the musical score data contained the parameter for background effect manipulation so that the BGM and background effects can be synchronized. So I had to create two converters to extract the waveform data from score+pitch data, and background manipulation parameter from the pitch data.

As for the sound effects, there was only pitch data and no music score. Instead, it was programmed like “Play the C sound with strength of 80!” directly to PlayStation. I was wondering for a while can I extract that… then came to the idea, “Why don’t I just use the converter I just made!” So I made the music score having “one single note with the sound of C with strength 80,” extracted the waveform data using my newly designed converter.

#IFTTT #Blogger