Diorama Sketches

Riding the waves

This project, in its planning stages, is quite the up and down ride. I go from being all gung-ho about it and excited one moment, to questioning how I can possibly get anything "good" out of it, how it will prepare me for any kind of career, how I can hope to make sequential dioramas when I have little to no experience with them....

I think the biggest fork in the road I see is whether I want the dioramas to be sequential or to be exhibited as separate narratives. Ideally, I want them to all thread together, but I have this hunch that the quality of the dioramas I'm making will change drastically with the second, third, fourth, fifth attempts....

I also have big ideas for "moving" dioramas, shifted lighting, and interactivity, but those are all overambitious at this point. I just need to sit down and make a diorama (or two) before I start thinking about the evolution of them.

I did some sketching tonight which had some positive results. I am happy with the composition of two (almost three) of the scenes I've had brewing in my mind for a while. I'll post them when I get them scanned and a color study thrown on top of them.

Some Inspiration

The Secret Garden (can't find the artist)....

A post on Terragenesis.co.uk
Thomas Doyle

Current Focus

Preparing for a brief presentation tomorrow has given me the chance to focus my energy on where I want to take my IP. The exercise mentioned earlier - executing a borrowed idea 3 ways and an idea from my own writing 3 ways has generated a couple of interesting results, but ultimately proven to me that diorama building is what I really want to make, and what I really want to get good at.

I was hesitant at first about the diorama concept, but I think all of hesitations are unfounded and are merely obstacles that I must be willing to overcome and work through.

At this point, I am ready to go all out to build these narrative dioramas that suggest a voyage and return style journey of a small child through a surreal, exotic dream world. Many sculptural elements in the scenes will be built digitally, then rapid prototyped. Much of the scenery will be built the way a miniature railroad builder or military diorama artist would work. Backgrounds may be painted (for open environments) or self-containing (for interiors).

I am trying to ask myself a lot of the "why? how?" kinds of questions, for both the concept and form of the project.

These questions include:

-What advantages does a diorama have?

-Why is the story I want to tell important, at all?

-Why do I have to work with digital media?

-How will building dioramas prepare me for a future career???

I have some of the answers, but still much more to consider....

The number one advantage/ reason to execute my project this way? The idea of surreal dioramas always gets me excited and I don't think I'll ever get bored or grow weary of it....

Walter Wick

Walter Wick, creator of the I-Spy books, does some really cool visual storytelling with miniature sets, forced perspective, and digital manipulations. This similar to the output I'd thought of for the Bedroom Diorama that I constructed this past summer- a digital assemblage consisting of a set, lighting, and "post-production" layering and photomanipulation.

This guy has a team of artists working for him to make these images, which is a little discouraging for me ("how can I ever achieve such quality when I'm flying solo?"), but also inspiring ("I see what he's done, and see that it works, and I can take that and spin it into confidence for my own diorama/ tableau work....")

2 Mind Maps

The first is for my idea of 'mythopoeia,' or generating a mythology.
The second is the components of building shadowbox dioramas. The more I investigate visual styles for my project, the more I convince myself that I want to build shadowboxes....

***The bubbles in the second picture are saturated according to my confidence level of that particular bubble. E.g., I am very confident in painting and sculpting, but have little to no confidence in 'Shadowbox Construction' or 'Knowledge of Electricity.' This is a nice way for me to lay out visually what areas I need to push myself to investigate.

Mind maps were created with Bubbl.us, a free mind-mapping program (I believe it's Java based)....

More pictures coming soon

My new direction is this: taking two narrative ideas (one of my own invention, one that has been previously established) and executing each idea 3 different ways. This is in response to my inability to make decisions on a visual style; hopefully this will give me an idea of where I want to place the emphasis of my IP project, and how I want to execute it.

I am using the Fall of the Sun myth (of my own creation, which is, of course, not really original at all, but taking and reinterpreting various sun myths) as well as the character Geryon from Dante's inferno. Geryon is the monster of Fraud. It is interesting to me to see how Dante has adapted and reinterpreted Geryon to fit his own allegorical needs from his original roots as a Spanish king. Furthermore, its interesting to see how I interpret Geryon in my head, and how he takes on qualities unique to my brain (in comparison with other representations of the monster). He is already becoming something of my own creation....

I haven't been bringing the camera to studio, but there will be many more images soon. I actually have a ton of stuff to post- commentary on the Goonies, a mind map (or two) and some interesting links....