Landscapes

AO1, AO2, AO3

Summary

My sub-theme of landscapes aims to reflect the structure of the natural world. The work consists of scenes typically depicted in landscape painting such as fields and forests, created using photographs I have taken locally. Each piece was made in Blender and then edited in Photoshop to try and mimic the style of an oil-painting. The 3 still pieces were created in the style of an artist named Ovanes Berberian, using techniques I found in his art. The animated GIF aims to bring his work to life in the style of an art gallery run by Exhibition Hub, who are the potential client.

Inspiration

My theme of natural structure will focus on exploring landscapes such as forests, mountain ranges or hills. I enjoy walking and climbing in nature and am always interested with how the appearance of a landscape can change with the seasons and at different times of day. Landscapes always have been and still are a very common subject that artists choose to paint, and there are plenty of styles such as realism, impressionistic, abstract. Because of this, finding an artist whose style I like and can use for inspiration should not be a challenge. After looking through a wide range of landscape artists, I focused down on the following three below:

Ovanes Berberian

The primary reason I chose Ovanes Berberian was because I believe he paints in a way that makes landscapes that might otherwise be considered 'boring' look aesthetically pleasing. He can make a plain field look interesting through his use of colour and blending. His work often contains a dramatic sunset paired with a haze hanging in the distance. Berberian's work always has great composition: I've noticed that he tends to put something in the centre of the painting as a focal point - be that a tree or a fence. Behind, he paints large hills in a less detailed manor. His use of very simple landscapes with only few objects is perfect for me, as working with fewer objects and polygonal count will make rendering a lot quicker. Overall, I believe Berberian would most likely fit best with my theme as his depiction of structures works well with my ideas and technical aspects.

Laura Plageman

Laura Plageman makes use of distortion and photo editing to present nature as a confusing and abstract theme. I believe Laura Plageman's art makes a dramatic impact. She layers and interweaves multiple images into one, skewing, blurring or even scrunching them like paper to get an abstract effect, all while keeping the original natural elements of the photograph. I chose Laura Plageman because her artwork manipulates and distorts structures which could work with some of my more abstract ideas. I also felt I could fairly easily develop responses to her work, using Photoshop and Blender to recreate the paper-like image manipulation she uses.

Mikael Gustafsson

Mikael Gustafsson's work consists of digital environments. He uses programs such as Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop and Blender to create scenic landscapes, of forests, hills and mountains. At first, Gustafsson's art looks almost photorealistic, but after closer inspection, you notice that each shape is made up from either a single colour or a gradient. Gustafsson uses a mixture of dull, dark colours and bright, vibrant ones. This drastic difference in colour is how he depicts the natural light from the sun hitting his landscapes, adding a sort of focal point to his paintings. I primarily chose Gustafsson because not only do I think his work is visually appealing, but also for the simple fact that he uses a lot of the software that I also use, meaning creating responses will easier and more accurate to his style of work.

Client and Artist

As for my client, I've selected Exhibition Hub - an art gallery that animates and displays artwork from different periods of time. Exhibition Hub's most well-known exhibit is the Van Gogh immersive experience in which they took some of Van Gogh's best works and digitalised them into animated renders. They then projected them onto huge screens to create a walk-through gallery. Exhibition Hub also offers virtual reality experiences to provide a deeper immersive understanding for visitors, and educate them about the life of Van Gogh. I believe that Exhibition Hub opens up a lot of opportunities for me to connect the different sub-themes, as the gallery concept can be used to display all different types of art. I am also interested in the fact that an art gallery itself is a form of structure, and that one as advanced as this can become part of and enhance the artwork that it is displaying.

Ovanes Berberian, born in 1951, works from his studio in Idaho, US. Berberian's work is recognisable from his vibrant colour pallet, soft brush strokes and dramatic landscapes. Some of his paintings portray a feeling of tranquillity through the use of gentle colours, blended in calm strokes. Others portray nature as chaotic and majestic through deep red skies and distant hazy hills. Personally, I believe that while Berberian's art can feel slightly empty at times, his choice of colours and skill at blending them makes up for the lack of focal points or subject matter in his artwork. The primary reason I chose Berberian was because I believe that of the three artists, Berberian's paintings would be best suited for my client - Exhibition Hub and would also be most suitable for rendering using my skills and tools.

Artist Responses

For my response, I decided to create a landscape using the 3D modelling software Blender then add filters in Photoshop to produce a digitally rendered oil painting in the style of the Berberian. I first needed original photographs to work with, so I went out walking and did a photoshoot of forests and fields that offered suitable 'natural structure'. I took a range of photos covering both textures and scenery and picked out the best 20. I took the majority of the landscape photos from a low angle to help capture the outlines of natural structure such as treelines. For the textures, I photographed bark, rocks, and dirt - images that I could edit into a seamless PNG and use to texture my 3D scene. I was planning to create 3 pieces- all including the themes that I've noticed in Ovanes Berberian's work - such as dramatic skies, haze and focal points.

For the first response, I imported one of my photos as a reference image into Blender. I inserted a cube object, added some loop cuts, and started dragging its vertices to fit the shape of the ground. From there, I modelled one of the more distant trees and replicated it, laying out the distant treelines. I wanted the closer trees to be more detailed than the ones in the distance, so I made use of the inbuilt sapling tree gen add-on which allowed me to generate high quality, realistic trees. I created a new tree, changing some of the generation settings to better match the style of the one I had in my reference image. With the major objects done, I moved on to fill in the gaps and add in the distant hills and city skyline. At this point I decided to change the lighting of the scene to a deep orange sunset as I believed it would better suit the style of Berberian's dramatic skies. Once I was happy with the lighting, I modelled a simple bench to fill up the empty space and imitate Berberian's use of focal points. Finally, I rendered the scene, imported it into photoshop and added the oil paint filter to finish off my first artist response.

For the second response, I started off in the same way: importing my photograph as a reference image into blender, setting up the camera and a spotlight to imitate the sun. Next, I created a rough shape of the treeline at the back of the field as I was again planning on using the Sapling Tree Gen add-on to make the trees much more detailed. I then added a cylindrical object and started smoothing out both edges using the bevel tool to make a hay bale. After using the subdivision surface modifier to raise its polygon count and make it smoother, I went to photoshop and opened one of my grass textures. I blurred the edges to make it somewhat seamless, changed the image's colour to a more yellow hue and exported it. I then proceeded to texture the hay bale and replicated it around the field. Once happy with the layout of the scene, I went back to the Sapling Tree Gen add-on, changed some of the settings, deleted the trunk, grouped the leaves and decorated the treeline using them. After finishing texturing, I manipulated the lighting and added some fog using the volume scatter shader to give the scene a sense of depth. Once again, I rendered, imported it into photoshop and added the same filters.

And as for my third and final response, I started it the exact same way: I imported the reference image, added a camera object from which the render will be taken, and started adding and modelling the core objects such as the path and background hills. Next, I used the Sapling Tree Gen add-on to make trees and shrubs. I cropped a tree from one of my photographs, changed its hue, added some filters and textured it onto my newly made foliage. As this photograph was mostly composed of trees, I needed some variation to make it look more natural. I made a couple of the trees a different colour by changing their texture's emission colour on Blender and changed the shape and size of others. With my variety of trees, I replicated them around the scene, layering them to bring out depth. After I was happy with the tree layouts, I added a texture to the path, sky and hills and started changing the lighting. I again added a Volume Scatter shader to replicate a haze. With that I saved the final render and exported it into photoshop. Once again, I cleaned up some of the rough edges and added the oil paint filter.

Animated GIF

As this brief was on GIFs, I decided this would be a good opportunity to make some advertisements for my previously mentioned client - Exhibition Hub. I decided to make a few GIFS, one for the hypothetical landscape and scenery themed gallery, and a couple for the skeletal themed one.

To start, I opened the blender file I had previously made of the hay bale field. I started by removing the trees as they wouldn't work with the new planned lighting system. I created the shape of a tree in photoshop using the brush and eraser tools before importing it into blender and alpha blending the background to make the transparent part of the PNG invisible. I replicated it at the back to create the treeline and moved onto redoing the lighting. I added a sphere and changed its subsurface colour to yellow and added a glow and bloom. I grouped it with a spotlight and added it's position to an animation track. At intervals I changed its position so that it moved across the sky. With the sun done, I went back to photoshop and made a very wide canvas - this was going to be my sky. It was approximately 7000 x 1080 pixels. I made the entire canvas a gradient, fading from day to night. I textured it onto a plane and also added it onto the animation track. I made it move from left to right to mimic the sky changing throughout the times of the day.

To make the GIF a perfect seamless loop, I made the sky move instantly back into it's original position after reaching a portion that looks similar to the start. I duplicated the sun and turned its light white to make my moon. I tweaked its animation track to oppose that of the sun and to come up at night. I believed the gif looked empty so I decided to add clouds. The approach was very similar to the sky. I painted them in photoshop using the brush and blur tools, imported them into blender, alpha blended the PNG and keyframed it to make them move across the sky. As this GIF was of a super sped-up day cycle, I needed to make the clouds move very quickly across the scene. I then moved onto rendering each frame. This took a couple of hours as I had to wait for each frame to render and then export it. Eventually I was done. I had a folder with 90 frames which I brought into photoshop. I added the oil paint filter to every single frame and turned the layers into a timeline. With this, I had my GIF and I was done.

Evaluation

This was a solid start to my graphics course. I thought that mixing the oil paint filter with an animated GIF illustrated the idea of 'bringing art to life' extremely well. I learnt a lot of things in Blender such as how to use the tree gen add-on or how to make animations smoother using easing modes. If I were to improve anything, I think I would focus on making the scenes in Blender more carefully, as there were opportunities to improve the level of detail.

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