Ayami Kojima Interpretation

For this project, we were to create a piece using the influences and the styles of another artist; an interpretation of their work.

Many times for projects similar to this one, I would choose an artist that had a style which was not related in the game industry whatsoever. This time I wanted to choose someone who was renowned within the industry as it was also something different this time around for me.

Here are some of my favourite artists within the game industry that I looked into:

Yoshitaka Amano

Ayami Kojima

Yoji Shinkawa

Yoshitaka Amano is best known for his work on the early Final Fantasy series. What I like about his style is how stylised it looks and gives off a mystical and fantasy like feeling to me.

Ayami Kojima’s style has a gothic look to it that really appeals to me. In some of her pieces you can see a lot of ‘brushstroke textures’ on the images which I really like.

Yoji Shinkawa has a very inky look to his art. I love the way it feels very chaotic, yet very fluid as well. Another thing I really like is how a lot of his art blends in with canvas.

I decided to make a self-portrait in Ayami Kojima’s style and found a picture of myself where I was wearing quite appropriate clothes which were in my opinion similar to her character’s art. I created a mood board in order to get a general feel and mood of her paintings as I paint my own. I wanted to try and get some brush markings onto the painting on digital to practice some mark making techniques.

Moonshinin’ Time

The moonshining project stemmed from a project where the class voted on a time period in which everyone would make either a character, environment, or a vehicle (or all of them) of that time period. To begin the moonshine project, I had particular interest in the environment and the characters side of the project so I created mood boards on what I was could use for my painting. I looked into the hillbilly fashion, horses and 1920s police officers in America.

Hillbillys

1920s Policemen

Horses!

I followed on to watching a documentary I found whilst researching. The documentary was on an interesting fella known as ‘Popcorn Sutton’. He was one of the last original moonshiners and it was on his last ever moonshining, talking about the processes he had to go through to create good moonshine.

                                                             Interesting guy indeed.

Once I have gathered enough to understand what I want in my painting, I started to work out the composition I wanted to have. I went for a composition in which we are looking up slightly at the character on a horse.

I made the character have a banjo to add to his characteristics. I found that looking up at the character would make him a little more heroic which was something I wasn’t planning on doing; and so I heightened the composition in which made him a little more equal with the viewer.

I wanted to add a few more elements to the picture as well to make it a little more interesting by adding in silhouettes to differentiate a foreground to the middle ground. I added in leaves to show wind blowing from behind the moonshiner. I also wanted to add a little mysteriousness to the character so I dipped his hat slightly to cover his facial features in slight darkness.

At the end I played around with a few textures and really like the effect of overlaying fabric onto the image to give it a slight canvas picture look.

 

Interior Designing

I first started out looking at the different kinds of themes that interested me at the time. I think my choice was largely influenced by the music I was litening to at the time (which was the original soundtrack to Castlevania and Fire Emblem). I chose a church/religious type interior.

I studied some interiors of churches and corridors of old castles.

From the studies I moved onto blocking out a composition using 3DS Max Studio. I wanted an angled composition to begin with but after playing around a little longer I had an idea to an much more simpler composition. I had the idea of having more than just an interior and wanted to set a mood to the painting so I add silhouettes. I added this to also hint upon the time period it was sat aas well as add more to the sinister look I had going on.

As I am still fairly a beginner at Photoshop and its tools, I had only recently found out about the filters that the program had to offer. After playing around with various ones, I took a liking to adding the mosaic filter to my painting to give it a stony effect to it to further add to the overall feel of the picture.