Artists' Ideas

SALVADOR DALI

The artist Salvador Dali used his own insanity and dreams to come up with ideas. His work would often show this as they would be surreal and very dreamlike in appearance. Dali would draw or paint what he saw in his dreams from memory.

One of his most popular pieces, The Persistence of Memory, was based on dreams in general, be they his own dreams or that perhaps the creature in the middle of the image is in a dream state. It was painted in 1931.

PABLO PICASSO

Picasso was influenced by many things in his life. He was influenced by various world art like African and Greek art. He was also later influenced by world events and the woman he loved. During the Korean war he painted the Massacre in Korea which depicts North Koreans being killed by Americans and/or South Koreans.

CLAUDE MONET

Claude Monet was influenced majorly by John Constable and J.M.W. Turner when he visited a London museum in 1870.

These influences can be seen in his Soleil Levant (meaning Impression, Sunrise) - which is dated 1872 -where he used the image of sunlight passing through the fog, similar to Constable and Turner.

CHUCK CLOSE

Chuck Close (born Charles Thomas Close) was an American painter and photographer born in 1940 and is still alive today. He based his paintings and photos on people he knew (friends and family) and, using the photorealistic technique, made his work. Close believes "inspiration is for amateurs — the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you’re not going to make an awful lot of work". He therefore does not have any influences and simply does what he wants to do. Below: Close's Mark, 1978-1979.

DONATELLO

Donatello was an Italian sculptor, who worked within the 1400s. Donatello was mainly inspired by Classical figured, nudes and antiquity. He sculpted nudes and classical figures because they inspired him. His inspiration of/by antiquities was because of a trip he took to Rome to study some ruins. 

On top of these influences, he was influenced by some other artists, namely Brunelleschi and Ghiberti. The below sculpture is Donatello's, take on David (1408-1409). 

WAYNE THIEBAUD

Wayne Thiebaud is an American painter. He specialises in Pop Art, and paintings of cakes and other common items. He uses heavy pigment and exaggerated colours in his paintings of these items. As a young man, Thiebaud worked in a café and it could be his experience there that made him appreciate certain foods like cakes enough to want to paint them. This is Cakes, 1963. 

Evaluation of Poster

I finished my final poster some time ago as I could not find any ways in which to improve the poster. However, I now believe there were several things I could have done to improve.

I think that I could have re-done the backgrounds and flipped them; I believe it would have looked better if they swapped places. At this current point in time, there is a lava/magma texture on the floor and a rough, rocky texture in the far background. Both of these textures were made using Photoshop and they imply that the area is deep underground.

Poster

What is Concept Art, and What is its Purpose?

I have found a website full of well done and detailed concept art pieces. One concept artist that impressed me was Andy Park, he had pieces of concept art that were incredibly detailed, interesting and all had a somewhat dark tone to them. Subtle darkness could be this artist's style.

One image that really caught my eye was "AndyPark_character85" from Andy Park's website. The image is of a brutal-looking beast-man with a huge bladed weapon on/as his arm, which I found extremely fascinating. I was unable to find out what this character was from, what the concept was of. I find this disappointing as I would have loved seeing how this impressive thing would look in either a game or a movie.

 I also liked the concept art on mandrykart.com, on this website there are many images of concept arts from popular games and movies that this artist has done before the games were released.
Some I enjoyed were the various Tron: Legacy concept arts as they looked very cool and futuristic, which would be what the artist was going for.

 The purpose of concept art is to illustrate an idea or collection of ideas. Sometimes an idea alone is not enough to persuade someone. Therefore, concept art to illustrate said idea would be necessary for that idea to be actualised and to show just what the artist is thinking. Concept art is supposed to get the artist's point across and to give the animators something to work on. Concept art may be used to inspire the rest of the team working on a game for example, to make them want to animate the image that the concept artist has created.

 Concept art can be made for films, video games, animation, comic books and more. Concept art is often linked to drawing but it can be 3D animation also. Anything that needs to be designed and created needs concept art, even the likes of construction designs such as building plans, car plans, etc.
There are many types of concept arts. There is abstract, realistic and more, and the styles can range from photorealistic to classic painting, from quick sketching to detailed art pieces. As there are so many different styles of concept art, there are large numbers of art pieces which can be classified as concept art, all that matters is that the drawings are used as a way to visually show ideas to a group to inspure that group to follow through with making what the design drawing showed. In the video game industry, there has been a huge amount of fantasy or realistic style concept art pieces as the top-selling games of today have those kinds of influences in them.

 I particularly enjoyed this image as it was abstract and very odd but cool. I prefer this kind of design as it can be as weird and different as possible, thus leaving a big area for creativity and originality, which is usually a good thing. The elemental being looks as if it is an enemy/boss from a video game in my personal opinion, and it looks like it would have control over certain elements like lightning. This would explain how its body is being kept together; through electrical and magnetic forces. The use of colour here is great as the creature stands out because of the greying background and the creature's electric blue and yellow along with its red, firey head really shining through in the image.