GfxDiary

This is my outcome for a unit of my course entitled; ‘decorative imagery’. I looked in to 18th/19th century wallpaper designs and artist/designers such as William Morris.

I created a variety of different ‘tiles’ in range different mediums - some purely digital and some drawn by hand. Then rather than simply displaying each design next to one another, I used the ‘torn-off-to-reveal-layer-below’ as an innovative way to display my different designs in one image.

One of the tiles is in fact isometric pixel art. I first created it as standard pixel art at web resolution (72dpi) then enlarged it by four times. I used ‘nearest neighbor’ rather than ‘bicubic’ as a method of enlarging it so it didn’t go ‘fluffy’ when it interpolated. This way, it still looked crisp and true to pixel art in print. However, when I later downsized the whole image to 72dpi, for web use, it would have been tricky to get it back to looking like actual pixel art…so I didn’t bother.

Before I started creating anything on this, I knew I wanted the outcome to look old, worn and look like it has some history. I wanted it extremely textured and dirty with imperfections, such as the bleach splash etcetera, in order to appear more tangible, palpable and ‘real’. In a sense, this is to represent the aspect of traditional art that I miss in digital.

I took many photographs of old concrete and stone then merged/cloned them together. I also scanned canvas and stained, crumpled paper at high resolution. I had great fun with it - I was there rubbing a sheet of paper around on my kitchen floor.

I like to think of this image as “a fusion of the digital and traditional medium”.

As I previously mentioned, there are both hand drawn scans and photographs that went in to this image. But other than that it was all created in Adobe Photoshop CS2. It is intended for A2 print at 300dpi (a huge 4961 x 7016 pixels). Needless to say, at the resolution shown, it is impossible to appreciate the full effect of the detailed textures. When completed, the .PSD weighed in at almost 2 gigabytes! I love working high resolution, but my computer doesn’t. I can’t think of a better metaphor right now, but working as big as this on my PC is like trying to plow a meadow with a small hand trowel.

Below is an earlier WIP. This was before most of the texture was added. Only the canvas scan at this time - I was far from what I wanted to achieve.