The beginning of something beautiful

This was the first time something has really clicked for me in terms of art. And I mean REALLY clicked in a way that feels like my own. Every artist goes through that period of trying to define their own style. For me, this was the final piece in that puzzle.

A style develops from a combination of an artist's:

1. Unique perspective
2. proficiencies and proclivities
3. A third option probably. I havent thought that deeply about it. All good things come in threes

Ive always been interested in making things. As a kid, that included drawing. I've spent a non-inconsequential amount of time trying to improve my artistic abilities. I have managed to create some works that I'm happy with, but never in the way most artists seem able to. My approach involved a process I referred to as Trash Alchemy™. I've also referred to it as the Turd-to-trophy pipeline.

The idea is that you can shit something out. It may not be good due to a lack of time, experience, or any other factor. But you now have a base. it is now "concrete" in some way. You then work on the form, you iterate and improve on what is good about it and what works, you slowly remove the parts that aren't desirable. You then iterate and iterate until eventually, your trash transmutes into something that can resemble gold. In other words you polish it until it's shiny and can be presented.

My philosophy is that its always better to have something that you can present than to be dragon sitting on a proverbial hoard of unfinished projects.

Back on track

This project is the unique culmination of being mediocre at multiple things. I'm being a tad disingenuous here but for a good stretch, I was not happy with where I was. I had 3 things at my disposal:

• A novice's skill at 3D modeling and an incomplete understanding of texturing
• A drawing ability that left me frustrated and unsatisfied. This meant I could not paint a worthwhile artwork in isolation but just sitting down and painting something
• Some solid photoshop skills. This was one skill I was quite good at: Creating photoshop compositions. What I most enjoyed and what I felt I was best at was the rendering stage. Unfortunately, this is a skill that cannot on its own produce results. Spending hours trying to find the right asset images and then contorting them to fit the scene felt like pulling teeth and significantly dampened my passion for creating things

This lead me to the thought that: if I cant find the right assets, surely I can make them! A good idea positioned at the very peak of Mount Stupid. Only through going through it did I discover how wide of a field 3D is and how many sub-skills go into it. This led directly into the valley of despair and I found myself with yet another skillset where I was not able to create as I wanted to. I was once again held back.

I then sat with multiple folders of "unsatisfactory" work that I couldnt really show or feel proud of.

Enter: Trash alchemy

The original render for this was one of my earliest attempts at 3D modelling. I mean look at this: insert image here

It looks fine from a single angle but for literally anything else, its the equivalent of a road painted on a wall.

• The topology was horrendous, making it unfit for posing
• The texture was simply the character sheet projected from a single view, meaning I couldnt do any other angles or the illusion immediately falls apart.

It was a learning experience but I've poured so much time into so many "learning projects" and didnt have anything I could present. Tired of sitting in perpetual limbo. I figured "Let me push this a little and see if I can salvage it. Dig up some of my old skills and have fun it.

So I sat down with photoshop, grabbed a few interesting brushes and began painting. Here's where some ideas started forming. I had gotten so lost in the weeds in terms of honing the technical skill that I'd stopped thinking conceptually and being "creative"

The sliding scale between vision and method

There's this interesting phenomenon. When you start out with anything, you dont understand how things "should" be done and you know you cant achieve perfection on these early attempts. Your approaches are therefore grounded more in wanting to externalise something. To create purely from a place of interest. This imbues the work with passion and soul . The lack of constraints or broader considerations allows for a level of freedom and creativity that is often absent as you increase in skull.

Once you learn the process, you become locked into and constrained by the "object" (in the Activity Theory sense of the word.). Your focus shifts from exploration or purely creative, expressive endeavours to getting good at the application of something in a particular way.

The resulting works may be more refined but may also lack the soul that earlier works had. It then becomes difficult to get back to that same level of creativity because the conceptual tools become constraint in and of themselves.