Concepting with intentional and unintentional bias
I feel that I am already being swayed by the intention of my colour tests in that I am finding it harder to manipulate certain architectural elements to obscure/strip away the culture from the architecture. In my quest I have realised that I am further perpetuating the orientalist nature of perceiving culture as a set of easily identifiable markers and am 'stripping' away key elements which make the architectural style so closely tied into a particular culture.
I do feel that the purpose of my test is still valid as colour can inform many design decisions as well as culture when creating a game environment (mood, atmosphere, gameplay etc.). I just wanted to note that whilst creating my samples I must be doing so with a critical mind and ensure that I rigorously question the editing decisions I make when I choose to replicate an architectural style. Being conscious of my own prejudices and bias when designing is, I feel, an important part of being a concept artist as my interpretation of a brief will influence how I choose to concept artwork.
For example, I was asked by my tutors to concept a street view of my South Asian fantasy world (currently a WIP, I promise I will finish it!!). Although I had a vague idea of how I wanted it to look, I find that I usually get lost in the details in an attempt to inject 'meaningful' content. This means that rather than actually 'concepting' as I should have and laying out the composition of the image, choosing themes, time period etc. instead I was focused on writing the correct translation of 'pharmacy' in the Urdu language. Looking back on my previous post where I uploaded a WIP of this street view, I realised that I wasn't thinking critically about the work I was concepting and instead rushing to inject elements I was familiar with in an attempt to be able to say 'this is accurate'. Although using language correctly is important, I feel that it wasn't something right now I needed to focus on and I perhaps jumped a few steps ahead in design. As can be seen in the WIP, there are no people and no real sense of building structure (just initial blocks), therefore I wonder at how I could have already figured out there would be a pharmacy when I hadn't even considered what kind of people would be on this street?
Albeit a long winded one, this is just an example of what I mean by being conscious of the bias I have when creating artwork. Just to update, here are some more cropped images of other colour tests I have completed. I am about halfway in progress and hope to be finished soon:
On a final note (side note really) I was able to experiment with my brother's iPad Pro to create a quick character face. I was just trialling the pen and tablet to see how it felt to use this equipment and whether it was something I was suited to. I still have a long way to go but I gave it an attempt as seen on the right. As I was creating this face I was thinking of how someone in my fantasy world may look. I do think that my world will incorporate many ethnicities so this is just the first of hopefully many. I will postpone this for now as I want to finish the current works I have (street view, colour test and literature review). I just posted this here so it's documented and can be referenced at a later date.
I do feel that the purpose of my test is still valid as colour can inform many design decisions as well as culture when creating a game environment (mood, atmosphere, gameplay etc.). I just wanted to note that whilst creating my samples I must be doing so with a critical mind and ensure that I rigorously question the editing decisions I make when I choose to replicate an architectural style. Being conscious of my own prejudices and bias when designing is, I feel, an important part of being a concept artist as my interpretation of a brief will influence how I choose to concept artwork.
For example, I was asked by my tutors to concept a street view of my South Asian fantasy world (currently a WIP, I promise I will finish it!!). Although I had a vague idea of how I wanted it to look, I find that I usually get lost in the details in an attempt to inject 'meaningful' content. This means that rather than actually 'concepting' as I should have and laying out the composition of the image, choosing themes, time period etc. instead I was focused on writing the correct translation of 'pharmacy' in the Urdu language. Looking back on my previous post where I uploaded a WIP of this street view, I realised that I wasn't thinking critically about the work I was concepting and instead rushing to inject elements I was familiar with in an attempt to be able to say 'this is accurate'. Although using language correctly is important, I feel that it wasn't something right now I needed to focus on and I perhaps jumped a few steps ahead in design. As can be seen in the WIP, there are no people and no real sense of building structure (just initial blocks), therefore I wonder at how I could have already figured out there would be a pharmacy when I hadn't even considered what kind of people would be on this street?
Albeit a long winded one, this is just an example of what I mean by being conscious of the bias I have when creating artwork. Just to update, here are some more cropped images of other colour tests I have completed. I am about halfway in progress and hope to be finished soon:
On a final note (side note really) I was able to experiment with my brother's iPad Pro to create a quick character face. I was just trialling the pen and tablet to see how it felt to use this equipment and whether it was something I was suited to. I still have a long way to go but I gave it an attempt as seen on the right. As I was creating this face I was thinking of how someone in my fantasy world may look. I do think that my world will incorporate many ethnicities so this is just the first of hopefully many. I will postpone this for now as I want to finish the current works I have (street view, colour test and literature review). I just posted this here so it's documented and can be referenced at a later date.
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