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Digital Sculpture: City of Gold

If you have ever seen any of the Star Wars movies, you’ll see a consistent theme regardless of film: immense and seemingly infinite spaces.  In earlier episodes, the Death Star is perhaps the largest “space”, while Coruscant is the equivalent in more recent episodes.

I have always been fascinated with large scale settings such as these.  This is perhaps why I have always been fascinated with cities such as Tokyo and other large metropolitan centers.  The design and complexity of these areas is nothing short of staggering.

To create a digital matte painting of such a space takes considerable effort and planning.  To start an initial exploration process, I created several renderings which I call the “City of Gold.”  You can see the entire collection here.

Additional Renders

(The first render is based upon a Modo tutorial by Andy Brown and the second is a digital sculpture using a combination of curve extrusion and cloning.)

Positive Momentum.

While I unfortunately haven’t been able to spend too much time writing over the past several months, a lot has happened.  Fortunately, I am starting to see things come together the way I had originally envisioned and I am excited to convey a few key highlights here:

Big Generator:

Site Redesign – When I launched Big Generator earlier this year, my primary objective was to keep the design simple and focus most of my attention on the graphic design portfolio.  While I was pleased with the look, organization and intent of the original site, it had a number of design challenges that required attention – one such limitation was the lack of a formal communication channel.  You can see the new design and read about the rest of the limitations here.

Content Separation – When I launched my fictional blog (Microcosms) in 2009, I did so to maintain some degree of content separation from Incubator.  I decided to do the same for my business.  While I’ll still post ideas that tie into my business here, I want to be able to focus more attention on articles and topics that will interest and benefit potential clients.  My goal is to utilize biggenerator.com as a content publishing platform to expand my knowledge and skills in the areas of design strategy and brand development, both of which will increase my business credibility.

Portfolio – While I had compiled a portfolio a little over a year ago, I decided to rebuild the portfolio not only in digital format but in print format as well.  The digital portfolio is organized by year, and the most recent work can be seen here.  For the print version, I decided to purchase two 11×17 “screw-post” portfolios which tied everything together quite nicely.

Web Site Redesign: If you’ve visited the site in the past, you’ll notice that I’ve refreshed the site using a new WordPress theme.  I’ve searched for many months searching for just the right theme and am really pleased with the functionality and straightforward design of this one – ironically called “Basic Maths“.  I am also starting to introduce additional WordPress plugins to make the site more SEO friendly and easier to navigate.

Cintiq: While I’ll continue to do a lot of my drawing using traditional media, I will be starting to use Wacom’s Cintiq tablet to do much of my rendering.  This is an area that I am really excited about.


New Concept Art DVDs.

When I first became aware of the Gnomon Workshop many years ago, most of my DVD purchases were focused primarily in the 3D realm.  Over the past several years, and especially now, my interest has shifted less from the computer and more towards more “traditional” art and design concepts.  Interestingly enough (and perhaps not surprisingly), I have found my “analog” training over the past several years has given me a new perspective when creating images digitally.

It’s even more interesting that my journey began using mathematics to render shadows, and many years later I am using traditional media to accomplish the same (e.g. Prismacolor and NuPastel).

To continue my education, I recently added several DVDs from the Gnomon Workshop to my collection:

With the near conclusion of Design Drawing I, I plan to explore these videos in more depth and begin to take advantage of the lessons contained within.