Invisible cities final reflective statement

The aim of our first project was to introduce us to the idea of concept painting and digital painting. For this, we were given a series of cities from Italo Calvino’s ‘Invisible cities’. We had to draw a series of thumbnail sketches for each city, and after that we chose our favorite city to do three digital paintings on; an exterior establishing shot, a exterior low angle shot and an interior establishing shot.

I chose the city of Ersilia because out of all the cities I had the most inspiration for it, and I felt like I could take it in an interesting, creative direction. I had multiple ideas for the city, so I had to decide on having the city move on wheels as I felt I could execute that idea the best out of all the Ideas I had.

When it came to the composition of the paintings, I was most inspired by the overall feeling of the city when it was described in it’s entirety, with the web of strings, the city itself, and the tents on the mountainside. It was important to me to get some of those elements into each painting, with the exterior establishing shot featuring them all. I was pleased with all the final compositions, as I felt they fit the city well, and got all the components I wanted in.

Overall, I was relatively pleased with the final digital paintings, although I feel they could have been executed better. This is because I simply did not have enough experience with photoshop to fully realize the paintings the way I wanted to. I would love to re-draw these paintings once I have gotten more experience with photoshop. Out of the three, my favorite was the interior shot as I felt it had just the right atmospheric qualities.

My biggest issue with this project was hyper-focusing on the thumbnails, which lead to me neglecting the other aspects of the project. Overall, I was quite inspired by the source material, and I wanted to convey each city as best as I could, which in hindsight was completely the wrong thing to put all my focus into. I should have made the thumbnails less detailed and devoted more time towards the second half of the project, which would be the research, testing out different ideas for my chosen city, and the final three paintings themselves. Another big issue I had was keeping track of all my files, mainly not saving them in the right places and not realizing I had done so until it was too late.

For future projects, I will make sure to look at the project as a whole and allocate my time more wisely, along with making sure I know which part will need the most time. I will also take more care when it comes to making sure that I have all my files in the right place and saved in multiple areas I can access them at all times, such as OneDrive and my own personal portable hard-drive.