Final Exhibition

For me, games have always been a form of escapism. From being able to immerse myself and create my own fantasy world detached from reality, it has helped me cope with problems that I’ve been faced with throughout my life. 

Stemming from my love of games, I’ve always enjoyed drawing and designing my own characters to suit both existing and my own worlds I created. Because of this, I decided to showcase my imagination into my exhibition.

Therefore, my initial idea for the exhibition was to create an game world and bring it out into the real world to attempt to merge the two worlds (fantasy and reality) together. However, trying to convert a piece of art that is small and two-dimensional into something that is huge and three-dimensional proved to be one of my biggest problems. This is because even though digital can be manipulated to make it seem three-dimensional it is still on a two-dimensional surface.

Because of this, I had to rely on placing lighting intricately to give the illusion that it has some sort of three-dimensional quality to it. Therefore when I was placed in a large white open space, I had difficulty trying to achieve good lighting. Because I could not create the appropriate environment in this space, I moved into a narrower, darker space where I could truly experience how lighting would effect my piece. 

I had also wanted to show not just my characters design, but also my journey throughout the past year by the evolution of my characters and the story that was involved with them. Therefore, I wanted to have both of my characters fighting the creature. However, due to the complications with turning my digital pieces into a three-dimensional environment, I did not have enough time to complete a second character cut out. Because of this, if I had more time I would ensure that I created my second character so I could fully showcase my journey as a game concept artist. 

I had originally intended my piece to be purely printed out digitally to show my skill and focus on digital art. However, I found out the digital came out patchy due to the different lines on the paper. To fix this, I decided to paint my pieces with acrylic paint instead. I had also intended on having 3D pieces in my work, but I found out that the sculptures would be too heavy to be placed on the wall. 

I ended up solving this by changing how I placed digital pieces on my work. I instead cut them out based on the shapes, as well as only digitising a few of the pieces that are meant to stand out. 

Despite all of the problems I had encountered from my exhibition, I believe that I have still managed to complete what I had set out to do; making my own characters and environment into real beings. I also believe that my exhibition is also very immersive to the viewer by engaging more than one of the senses. As immersion has been such an important component for game worlds for me, I wanted to ensure that viewers could experience being a part of the world just like I do.