For this exercise, I was asked to create a series of illustrations that explored my relationship to digital technologies. I am of the generation where computers became more commonplace, and the first 8-bit games were some of the first I played. Games and technology have become an integral part of my life, even as an adult.
I struggled with what to cover in terms of my relationship with digital technology. In the end, I looked to cover the mix of emotions that the subject brought up for me. I had three ideas that I felt capable of exploring (which was difficult given my ongoing poor mental health) and it was easier for me to explore the sketch work digitally.
Idea One - 'AI Sucks all the joy out of art'
The idea for this image was to represent the frustration I feel about generative AI. Some days it makes trying to be an illustrator pretty hopeless, and I feel like I am getting into an industry that could be wiped out at any second. When people thought about tech's role in the workplace of the future, we all seemed to think that it would be used to automate all of the boring repetitive work to free up our time to be more creative. Instead, it's taking all of the creative work so that we can all do the boring repetitive work more 'efficiently'.
I created a square canvas, thinking about how I might use an image like this on social media. Using my sketch I blocked in the shapes. For colour, I experimented with a palette and shading that I chose to try and replicate games on the Nintendo Entertainment System of the 1980s.
I had to really think about the shape language to communicate effectively. I also had to think carefully about gaps and contrast so that the image read correctly. I soon learned that there is little room for extraneous visual information, and doing this first image helped me to start thinking carefully about placement.
Idea Two - Thrall from 'World of Warcraft'
While gaming has been a big part of my life from a young age, I have probably dedicated the most time to one multiplayer game: World of Warcraft, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year! While I have sometimes taken breaks, even over a year at a time, I have still been drawn back to the game and its characters. So I wondered if I could capture two central characters in a kind of pixellated portrait. I laid out a rough idea of the image I wanted to go for, and by the time I got to the end of that sketching process, I decided that I just wanted to concentrate on one of the characters - Thrall.
So when I started working digitally, I changed the composition to focus on him standing alone. I used game images and game art of his current attire as references. The more I worked, the more I got used to making choices for the context of the pixellated image, rather than for 100% accuracy.
This meant I had to choose what to change, what to simplify, and to translate what I saw in the reference images. I transposed the complex images into something that worked in a flatter, 2D context with slightly less regard for things like perspective.
Once I had the main figure done, I decided to experiment with the background, going through a number of options; I considered both internal and external locations before settling on an outdoors motif that was still within the gamut of the overall palette and allowed me to play and experiment with achieving textures and gradients without detracting from the main image itself.
Idea Three - A tale of hyperfocus
When I think back to this anecdote, it's a miracle I managed to end up married to my wonderful wife. It's also a testament to her fathomless patience, empathy and understanding. It speaks to how, even then, she recognised my different brain and accepted it, whilst also keeping me grounded.
For this image, I wanted to emulate the style of an old RPG game. When I was young I played different series of roleplaying adventures from Sierra games, nearly all of which adopted a forced perspective similar to this:
I went with a different approach with the sketch, opting for a truer isometric view which, given the subject matter I had in mind, felt more appropriate.
Turning this into a pixellated version was a lot harder than I expected - working with blocky squares meant that it was very unforgiving to achieve the diagonal perspective lines. I used an isometric grid to help me, but sometimes I needed to improvise in order for things to read. I believe that some of this didn't quite work as I had hoped, and it doesn't feel as crisp as I would have liked.
My (now) wife and I had only been seeing each other for about three months; World of Warcraft had released its very first expansion pack, and I was loving it - back then I had a lot more time at my disposal, and would stay up gaming until the early hours.
One evening, my wife had come over to hang out - we'd had a lovely evening curled up on the sofa together, and she was happy to go to bed and leave me to indulge my hobby.
Little did she or I know that I would get hyper-focused on the game. She awoke well after 3 am to find me still playing and insisted that I come to bed. She was so tired her choice of threat was... unique and it made us laugh so much the next morning it's still a threat she uses today if I become hooked on the wrong thing for too long!
The scene was at night, and that meant I had to work out how to capture the difference in light. I found this very very challenging with the very limited palette that I had chosen for the image, and looking at the image now I am wondering if I should have used more black for deep shadows and be bolder with my use of blue from the screen. The image seems to lack the sense of contrast that I was going for in my head - however, I do feel like it still reads well. Honestly, I am just proud to have gotten three images - and this exercise - completed, given my severe depression and aggravated ADHD symptoms.
One of the things that I found most difficult with this image was actually the text. I tried to work out how they achieved readable typefaces with minimal pixels and found it almost impossible to do well by hand. So I researched a free typeface which is designed to emulate those used in the games I played as a child. The problem then, is that typefaces are rendered as vector objects, which then created a disconnect between the typeface's size and the established size of 'pixels' in the image itself. I had to manually experiment with the size of the typeface next to some reference pixels in the image to establish the same size for the 'pixels' in the letters as those in the illustration. I am not sure it is a perfect fit, but I think reads essentially the same to the naked eye.
It was good to try and produce three different image styles for this exercise which allowed me to maintain focus a little better, and allowed me to appreciate the skill that goes into creating pixel-style art - now and also the originals I grew up with. It's deceptively difficult and I have a massive amount of respect for the early developers who managed to achieve amazing results given the very limited capabilities they had at their disposal.
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