Simplify all things!

I’ve been wanting to simply my art even more so I decided that the Beyond Human challenge was a good opportunity to try out new things. The reason why I wanted to simplify my art was mostly for myself: when you take away a lot of the modern rendering techniques and shiny materials you usually end up only being able to rely on your core art skills, which in the end was the ones I wanted to improve the most.

When the Concept Design phase of Artstations Beyond Human challenge ended I was looking over most of the entries trying to find a concept that seemed like a perfect fit to realize in 3D. Looking over the entries however I realized that the ones I liked were not actually viable for 3d-art-production in such a short time. Which is a good thing to be considering if you’re a concept artist wanting your art to become 3D at some point.

In the end, I decided to do my own thing since there was nothing that immediately stuck that I felt that I had to make.

Did you know you can grow by thinking?

I think my biggest take-away from this whole experience is about how much you can grow in your core-art skills with just thinking about the art you’re going to make. You don’t actually have to be making art to get better but you can analyze and think about other peoples art to both be inspired and grow yourself. Now you might say to yourself: Well duh!

However! It might be worth asking yourself; Do I take enough time analyzing other peoples art? Do I think about what makes particular pieces of art stand out among all the other pieces out there? What makes this art-piece good? Is it the execution, creativity, composition? In the end you’ll realize that it doesn’t matter how good your textures or models if the composition and colors aren’t harmonizing.