Year 2 - Week 19 - March 5th - 9th

Finished my Paris project. Problem was that I wanted to do a grey scale final piece in Photoshop, however it didn’t go as planned.

I don’t know what went wrong it just didn’t go as I had imagined in my head, so I found myself rendering the final sketch I had drawn.

I went for the typical street café scene you usually find in Paris, or pretty much around France itself. I looked into Art Nouveau, in which is something I had studied back in college. 

Everything with Art Nouveau or even Art Deco is that everything is over decorated. Basically when looking at Art Nouveau inspired designs you’ll find that everything is form over function. Everything is made to look pretty and not do what it should as good because of it. Paris itself is probably the ‘prettiest’ city on the globe, with everything based on ‘romance’, ‘love’ and fashion etc. Everything must look beautiful almost, just like watching the film Angel-A. Everything in that film is designed to make it look good, everything is expensive and over priced and everyone and everything is based upon looks.

This brings me to a sort of question about Game Art and Design, I personally believe something should do what it is meant to do rather than look amazing good. But it sort of asks the question of do you go for something looking great by focusing more on textures or go for something just doing its job, via modelling? We learn both, we want to make models but we also texture them, it’s like we’re constantly asked to balance things out which is difficult and makes our work hard enough.

I go for function more, but as an Artist you should be looking at your form, but because we’re making in game assets we’re forced to try and balance it out in a way, sometimes it’s asking to go more with looks and sometimes function. What makes things more appealing to us is when an object hits both of these things at high detail.

Take the iPhone for example, everybody wants one because it can almost do anything but also looks sleek and smart, it’s almost a stylish and is a part of ‘hardware fashion’? Maybe I’m getting way to ahead of myself. I think understanding these really help within the gaming industry because we’re essentially working together to produce a product to sell to the world.

I want to be a game designer and work on level design hopefully and I think that knowing these types of things is a sort of fundamental skill that helps in the process with coming up with ideas for games. We’re looking at how a game works (function) but also what it is going to look like (form/aesthetics) as the two combined together.