Weeks 13-20 – Traditional Painting & CG 'Carceri' Mission Statement

What with the whole 'already done the Storytelling unit with relatively few emotional hangups' thing, I shan't be participating in it this time around. Instead, I'll be focusing on the personal artistic growth that should have happened over the summer but mysteriously didn't. I'll have two projects on the go, so I can procrastinate on one by working on the other.

The first is a lot of studying of traditional painting techniques; making studies from the masters and suchlike. Alan recommended the book 'Colour and Light' by James Gurney, so I'll be learning about the mechanics of painting as well as the technique. The areas of my skillset I'll be focusing particularly on are a) speed, b) value, c) colour theory, d) composition and e) markmaking, and that's mostly what I'll be 'assessing' myself on when this is over.

The second is a full CG environment of at least one of Giovanni Piranesi's Carceri d'Invenzione, or, Imaginary Prisons. I discovered them when researching prisons for my abortive Environment project, and immediately thought 'holy crud I have to build one of these'. The Carceri have already been built in CG, by one Gregoire Dupond, but his depiction of them is to perfectly recreate the etchings so that the environment itself appears to be etched. On the other hand, I intend to build a mostly realistic interpretation with minimal stylisation.


Dupond's continuous panorama tempts me to stitch several of the plates together to form a larger environment, but the final decision on that one will be made once I've more carefully considered my time. I shall endeavour to avoid referencing Dupond, however, as I want this to be a personal interpretation of Piranesi (that, and Dupond's camera work and sound design make me want to weep). This project is going to rely heavily on my ability to make highly accurate orthographs, and given that I've never made any before I'm going to have to learn very quickly indeed. As the Environment project did not reach fruition, I want this project to be the unifying of everything I've learnt over my time on the course, and to prepare me as much as possible for the commission in week 21.