It wasn't easy to know how to approach this final assignment. When I had originally read through the coursebook, I had a rough map of the kind of topics that I might want to focus on; areas I wanted to explore more as part of my practice. As ever, no plan remains untouched once you get going. By the time I reached this part of the module my experiences and tutor feedback needed to be considered too.
Initially, I had wanted to explore concept art as an area of interest, particularly environment design. So when my tutor suggested considering how my Spindrift persona might tackle landscapes I felt that there was a natural overlap that I could still explore. My first obstacle arose when I came back to the Assignment's brief. I found it confusing - on one hand, it notes that
It’s important that you decide on the element of unconventionally, or creative risk that you are comfortable with, rather than trying to second-guess what your tutor may expect.
but this is after it initially briefs the student to
...think about mixing up sizes, shapes, forms and materials, and to do something you have never done before. In fact, it might be something no-one has ever done before!
I found this incredibly hard to reconcile. How did I balance exploring the world of concept art (which has established approaches which are expected and tested) and learning its conventions with meeting the needs of the brief to be more free-form and experimental? I decided that the best thing to do was to start putting things from my head onto paper. So I went to my sketchbook. Using the pages, I started to make spider and connection diagrams to think through the problem and how I could tackle it successfully.
I started with key points from my own reflections as well as the feedback I had received from my tutor. I started to look for connections and themes wherever I could. One thing that was really important to me was making sure I remained engaged. Something I called "The Rule of Cool". It became a constraint and filter for my choices. The exploration gave me a few avenues to pursue, but nothing was leaping out at me.
That is when it hit me - one of the key strategies I have been cultivating as a way to improve my imagination, storytelling and growth mindset has been to re-explore the world of tabletop roleplaying games. Reading these books, and playing games with others over web communications has allowed me to get closer to the highly imaginative state I remember having when I was younger. A state that feels closer to how I feel when adopting the Spindrift mask.
I considered how I could draw on this experience and allow it to influence the assignment. Ultimately, I realised, my approach was gated by a choice between two paths (or two constraints you might also say):
To create an imaginative adventure within a world that had been established.
To create an adventure in a totally new setting from my imagination.
The second really appealed. It is something that is on my big bucket list to do, but I feared that attempting this would be biting off more than I could chew. Looking at the work of James Gurney and Dinotopia, I reasoned that this would have taken him months, if not years. I had only 90 hours. How did I scale this back? So Option One seemed the logical choice from the perspective of actually making something in the time, but I feared that it did not live up to the assignment's brief which expected experimentation.
I decided to explore the new world idea a little more. The problem with using an established setting, to my eyes, was that they invariably revolved around a world where everything seemed to be going wrong (think of the dystopian 21st century of Bladerunner, for example). This didn't seem very Spindrift. I wanted to create a world which had strong roots in hope, balance, and perseverance. It doesn't mean there isn't adversity, just that people's mindset of how to combat that adversity is different.
I had been reading an article in ImagineFX magazine [1] and was intrigued by an article they had written about the emergence of the "solarpunk" aesthetic. A hopeful view of the future based on humanity's balance with the world and ourselves, about renewing community and rejecting aspects of late-stage capitalism that is destroying our health, humanity and planet.
So I explored this option in my sketchbook, thinking how it might be a narrative setting, and researching technology that is already being created that fits into this new world. One of the things that struck me was that a lot of the images that had been created by artists in this genre still revolved a lot around the idea of big sprawling cities. This seemed contrary to the solarpunk ethos of living with the planet.
I envisaged a world where we didn't need to congregate thousands of people into small spaces, and how the re-emergence of community combined with technology would allow a dis-aggregation of people to occur. A return to pre-industrial concepts where communities were largely self-sufficient.
One of the roleplaying games I have enjoyed reading is Tales from the Loop, which is an adaptation of a world created as an art book by Simon Stålenhag, a Swedish artist.
In his book, Tales from the loop [2] he depicts an alternate Sweden in the 1980s, where technology has allowed advancement, but also very strange occurrences.
He also then expanded this approach with follow-up works Tales from the flood (also turned into a roleplaying game) and then more narratively (the images tying directly to a specific story this time) with the illustrations for the book Electric State.
This made me start to think about the relationship between the images and the other products (a roleplaying game and a TV show). Of how narrative images could be used to then build out more details into the worldbuilding. This gave me an inkling of how I could constrain my efforts in this assignment. Coincidentally, my tutor kindly checked in on me around the same time, so I used the opportunity to discuss my impasse more. This was incredibly useful, as it ultimately allowed me to confirm that this approach of three scenes that could later be built into a wider world was the best constraint.
I had already started to think about possible scene ideas, and I decided to use these as initial prompts to explore three different images. I discussed with my tutor approaching conceptual art in media that would push me outside of my comfort zone. There was the opportunity to explore my painterly approach more in a landscape setting. However, I also wanted to draw on some of the feedback from previous assignments as a way of combining everything I have learned so far in this section.
This included how to revisit the photo-compositing approach, exploring the world of 3D software (something I put off in the past as it seemed too daunting) as well as improving my painting process by removing myself from direct photographic reference. In the next blog posts, I'll explore each image in turn.
References
Combrinck, T. (2022) “The Rise of Solarpunk,” ImagineFX, November, pp. 22–27.
Stålenhag, S. (2020) Tales from the loop. London etc., UK: Simon & Schuster.
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