Project 1: Self Assessment

I based my project on a landscape I had imagined for one of my original stories. As an aspiring author, I felt that if I could put this landscape on paper, it would help me move forward in putting together the rest of the story as sort of a concrete base to work from. My intention was to imagine what a subterranean environment might look like if bio-luminescent life were more common than it is in the real world, along with making it look like someone could live there, even if there were no signs of animal or human life in the piece.

I began my project in Adobe Illustrator, sketching out the basic line art of the piece. I had initially intended to create an environment that looked more civilized than the final product did, but creating shapes that looked like inhabited places and putting roads and other signs of a town or city into the environment was proving to be a challenge, and as time was limited I opted to skip these shapes in favor of a more simple environment with just a river, mushrooms, stone pillars, and a cave. Though the resulting environment looked very simple, it still satisfied the subterranean look that I had been aiming for.

I then imported the line art into Photoshop in order to begin giving the piece more depth. I began with the base colors, grays for the rock surfaces, bright colors for the mushrooms, and blue for the water. I then added textures to each piece, making custom brushes for them to make them more like I wanted them to look, though I lost my first water brush when Photoshop crashed and I couldn't seem to recreate it. Finally, I added some fog and shading to the piece, using the timeline to animate the lighting of the mushrooms as well as the movement of the water and fog.

Though I was, on the whole, satisfied with how my piece came out, I think with a little more time and effort than I was able to put into it it could have come out even better. The water animation and shadow shading, in particular, could have had more to them, and perhaps a few signs of animal life could have been added, such as small glowing bugs or a pair of eyes in the cave. The simplistic feeling of my piece is nice, and adequately conveys a soothing subterranean atmosphere, but in some ways it feels a little barren, just a little bit lacking. The smooth flow animation I was able to do, however, does add to the ambiance of the piece, giving the environment a happy, calm feeling to it as opposed to a creepy or mysterious feel. In the future, I will set aside more time than I had for this project to work on the piece in order to get a better sense of the shading and coloration my pieces need, as well as to add more complexity to the piece if necessary.

Overall I believe, taking into account effort and outcome, I deserve a B for this project.