Scott Grant
THE BIG ONE
[Progress Report 10/11/2021]
Of the things we were told about this part of the project, 2 things were the main focus:
1. The piece must be a self portrait of yourself and/or utilise something that represents you.
2. It must contain or use techniques or parts that are connected/from previous parts.
For the first target I used the most common thing in my work, a helmet, to represent myself. The second target was something that I didn't 100% understand back then, as you can see from the sketch I didn't reference much of my previous work, this was because I was too focused on the first target and not the second. However I did correct this in the actual product, referencing almost every project I've done in one way or another.
Original Sketch
LAYERING
[The image here doesn't represent the current state of the project]
Considering how much there will be in it there's going to be a ton of layers, and considering I'm not done there's will be even more than already.
Ordering the layers was also a priority due to how many parts would be overlapping with each other. Some problems still exist, mainly where the gears overlap, as the lines are visible through each other (As of now this has been fixed).
This picture of my work is already dated, with more parts added
As you can compare between the original sketch and this version, a lot of things have changed.
The right gear is mostly the same as before, referencing something that wasn't in a previous piece, the character Jevil from Deltarune, however I changed the yellow orb and blue smoke to a green orb with purple clouds to be a call back to my piece based on Risk of Rain. Originally I was also going to do the clouds in Photoshop to make them more cloudy but when I brought an exported version of this into it the resolution was butchered and I wasn't sure what to do.
The right gear's piano-esque teeth were changed to reference when I used tools like the Scallop and Swirl tools on shapes, as I realised that I didn't have much of a connection with pianos.
The hand references some of the original concepts for the portrait. The broken stagelight became a lightbulb with a mountain and BAR sign to call back to when I was testing photoshop's opacity, layering, and colour changes. And the entire Elk image I made was brought in because I couldn't replicate the antlers without it (the final image won't have the whole image in, only the horn I copied over.)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PHOTOSHOP MIXING
(12/11/2021 Progress Report)
I had been thinking for a long while to mix Illustrator with Photoshop, my original idea came from screenshooting/exporting the illustrator piece and then putting it in Photoshop and then swapping back and forth. That didn't go well. However later I came up with a better method.
Clouds from Photoshop
By making a piece in Photoshop with a clear background and then exporting it as a PNG I could then import the images into Illustrator, allowing me to utilise the complexities of Photoshop's brushes and the simplicity of everything in Illustrator
Clouds from Illustrator
I had the idea to have a realistic eye peaking through the visor's holes or a part of the visor would be removed with it peering through the gap.
However during the process of making and then placing the image in I had issues, like the skin, the eye feeling awkward, and then I thought that changing the colours to look darker would make it better.
It made it look worse and it didn't fit.
The image is still in the piece, however it's 90% covered up with only 3 black lines being translucent enough for it to be slightly visible.
I was going to try more but the eye left a bad taste in my mouth.
So I decided to draw a Fumo of Reimu from Touhou, to reference a time when I inserted Cirno (also from Touhou) in a previous piece. It was also the first in this piece to have an image inserted in the piece for me to reference (The Elk was traced over instead of just referenced).
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Background-Less Version of the piece
The Layers (All Images under Puppeteer Eye 1/2 are unused, along with Hand Sketch)
Inserting Other Illustrations
(12/11/2021 Progress Report)
Coming near the end of the project I'm at the point where I'm carefully looking at my past work to look for pieces that haven't been referenced yet, and one that I found was on the mood board, and that was for a Korean game called Library of Ruina. Originally I was going to have the whole of the group that were in the picture I chose, but then I wasn't sure how to fit them in, then I thought to lower the amount but I couldn't pick and I was skeptical if I could draw them, I even thought to put in a reference to Jojo's Bizarre Adventure with the posing.
I decided to just scribble in a different file, making large slashes when I had an idea, because one of the characters in that picture is a Puppeteer I thought to use the slashes into puppet strings.
I was told about how if you highlight the work done in one Illustrator file then drag and drop it into another it'd appear there.
I did that, however that caused an issue because I had to put everything into a small area so I had the make it smaller, which messed up the piece, making colours leave the lineart when they originally didn't.
With all layers on
I decided to add the Japanese onomatopoeia for "Menacing" into it so I could reference Jojo's Bizarre Adventure as I was intending, to clear up loose endings.
Due to the lack of a history tab and not knowing I was suppose to screenshot before editing, images representing "Before" have to be recreated and thus are not accurate to the previous design.
(I had to change the visor's height to not cover the new piece and change the "correction" part to not look out of place.)
The addition of the new piece fills in the left gear's middle, making it feel more complete, like the right gear.
Pretty much every piece that I've made before now has been referenced:
Purple clouds and a green circle referencing the Risk of Rain 2 inspired piece.
The 3 Birds referencing a piece with Judgement Bird from Lobotomy Corporation.
My original photoshop test, with the lightbulb, bar sign, electricity, water, mountain, and red ground.
My Elk piece.
Even the right gear was made before the project started.
And everything from the board, the purple and white, the helmet, The Binding Of Isaac, Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, and the metal bars all being referenced in one way or another.
And other parts not explicitly referenced, like the distorted shapes and Photoshop, were referenced through the methods they were made.
I even referenced things that haven't been referenced yet, the Touhou Fumo specifically.
Aside from cleaning things up there's a single question:
"Does this represent who I am?"
A knight's helmet-based background + visor containing pieces referencing a game based on someone's religious and abusive childhood, fiction-beings that have connections to authoritarian governments, and a toy from one of the most famous Japanese indie franchises ever. Do they represent me?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE BIG ONE
(Progress Report 12/11/2021)
Before
Helmet
The Binding of Isaac
First Photoshop piece
Library of Ruina
Jojo's Bizarre Adventure
Elk piece
Deltarune
Risk of Rain
Touhou
Lobotomy Corporation
After
On the final day I wasn't sure what was left to do, so I first went through cleaning things up, going through the teeth, Puppet, TV, gears, etc.
After that I thought to add a few extra things, I gave a 4th tooth to the left gear and placed it near the right gear (and made it look similar to a character named Spamton, also from Deltarune), gave the middle of the right gear a Roulette pattern, and added the Apocalypse Bird with the other birds.
The overlay layers were going to have low opacity brushes, to make it appear that the rest of the artwork would make up a shape of a helmet. I scrapped it because it wasn't pleasant to look at.
A lot of the choices to reference, Isaac, Risk of Rain, Lobotomy Corporation, Touhou, etc. were generally connected to something that I was in contact with around the time.
The elk horns and the card suits were the few pieces that used reference images inserted into this piece.
But also the Touhou Fumo, Puppet, Dogma, the right gear's pattern, and the Birds used reference images, but didn't have the images added into it.
Any Layer named "PS" stands for Photoshop, to tell when an image was done in Photoshop rather than Illustrator.
Only 2 Layers used Photoshop, the purple cloud and the eye that got covered up.
