Celine Pham's

My intention with this model is to try and project the world of Olga Grushin’s meta-fairytale novel, A Charmed Wife, into 3D space. In the story, Cinderella daydreams herself into a classic Disney princess world where animals sing and frogs transform into princes. I wanted to address the falsities of this world by emphasizing the staging aspect of the world with forced perspective elements and texture maps. I was heavily inspired by Disneyland, forced perspective sets from old Hollywood, minimalist theater sets, and pop-up storybooks (kudos to the professor for suggesting this). I believe that alluding to the paper quality of the world and stylizing it in that way will reinforce the theme of the world being someone’s escapist fantasy.

Because the world should represent a picture book, I tried to draw from my illustrator background by making my own texture maps for the world. First, I created thumbnails for the scene I wanted to set and working off of that, I first laid down the planes for the world and tried to layer it with 3D elements to add interest to the texture of the world. I made a lot of transparent images and tried to apply it to the 3D models and 2D planes in a way that adds some illusion of life and complexity to the small space I’m creating. Most of my challenges resulted from the amount of work I had to do, but it was really just endless tweaking. I had trouble getting the perspective down and figuring out how to adjust the texture map itself, but everything eventually sorted itself out. If I get another opportunity to revisit this project, I'd try to make it more abstract, work with sculpture, and create more intricate layers. Instead of focusing on a city view, I'll work on creating a scene.