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Final Piece

An Alternate Colour Scheme for my Final Piece

My Final Piece

Demonstrating the use of the Rule of Thirds

Demonstrating the use of the Golden Ratio

A Colour Palette

This is the completed version of my final piece. Once again, I struggled to decide on an ideal lighting for the scene, and even now I still consider both to be near equal. However, in the end I leaned towards the blue tinted skies, finding the black skies gave a bit too much of a contrast with the stars, and feeling the white glow at the top right felt a bit too intense and distracting.
I have added a planet to the bottom left of the screen. This was initially going to be a similar form as what I interpreted as the primary form in the piece I used for my artist research on Wassily Kandinsky, although after beginning to colour it I realised there was no real way for me to link the two. Nonetheless, I feel the planet adds to the scene nicely, as well as providing a vague sense of scale for the ship, and giving me a means of adding a glow effect.
Some lighting on the ship has been changed. Differences are subtle, but I tried to make the sides of the ship darker to indicate the sun was in front of the ship, outside of the scene, and that no light is being cast onto the sides.
I also smudged some of the stars to make them seem as though they were twinkling. I felt the sky was too plain with all the near identical stars, only differing in sizes, so I made some of them look more unique and eye-grabbing so as to prevent repetition and give the piece a sense of energy.
As you can see by the third and fourth images, I tried to abide by the Rule of Thirds and Golden Ratio. I feel that, when combined with the bright, alien colours that stand out against the dimly lit landscape, these techniques proved extremely effective at drawing attention immediately to the ship.
Overall, I am satisfied with the outcome of my project, and feel it was a huge success. Sadly I was unable to pursue my initial goal of making a bullet hell themed project, but I feel just as satisfied having completed the task I settled for.

Final Piece Ideas

At this stage the ship has been refined and finalised, and the majority of the detail has been added to the background (i.e. the stars). The piece is almost done, but I struggled to decide between the lighter or darker background, and a few, more subtle details are missing. At this point in the project, I'm also unsure of how to fill the large void in the bottom left. More stars would feel boring and plain. I eventually decide to use a planet, partially because of my research into Wassily Kandinsky (Although that was an initial source of inspiration, he has very little to do with the end result for the planet), and one of the images I used as artist research into Ralph McQuarrie:

Further Development

In the end I decided that using one of the previous pieces as a part of the PhotoShop experiment as a front for my ship and drawing around it to work that into a 3D piece (As seen in the first image) would be a much better idea. The above image is a rough sketch of my final piece. Below is the picture of the ship itself, created by skewing one of the other designs and cloning it to make the two side panels, and using another design (Again, skewed to give the impression of the ship being at an angle) as the front.
It was irritating to try and angle the three panels in such a way as they resembled a ship (Even now it seems like more of a space motorbike, or space rickshaw, although overall I'm a lot happier with this design), which was once again a matter of trial and error. It took roughly fifteen minutes to get an arrangement I was satisfied with.

Software Experiments

A further development in my project, this involves me blending the abstract shapes from my development ideas together in an attempt to get something that better resembles a spaceship. This was an experiment with PhotoShop to try and discover a style I liked, and although I disliked the results initially, I quickly figured out a way in which I could use them, so I consider it an overall success.
I had some difficulty trying to get all of the individual shapes to slot together, particularly in ways that looked different. On more than one occasion I found myself saving an individual design, only to realise it was the same as a design I'd saved previously, only tilted 30 or so degrees. This was more a process of trial and error, as well as using one's imagination to try and come up with something both visually interesting and something that could be considered a ship.

Development Ideas

The topmost image is a template I used as a basis for the top row of sketches, which are potential shapes for my final piece to take. This design proved to be rather time-consuming and problematic to follow, however, so in the end I decided not to follow it and opted to move on. The bottom two rows are me attempting to make use of abstract art to get a better general feel for a potential final design for my ship. In the end, all are used, although not individually.
It's fairly clear that this is the point where I attempt to make use of my research into Wassily Kandinsky and his abstract art. The heavy use of primary colours and simple but wild shapes are a result of me trying to create a similar piece to his own.

My method for this involved colouring a large area in PhotoShop black, then tracing around it with the polygonal lasso tool in the desired shape and deleting the excess. Below is an example shape I created via the same method, as well as the shape I extracted it from.

After extracting the shape itself, I toyed with two different methods of adding colour. Simply colouring them by hand was fairly effective and easy, but using the polygonal lasso tool again in order to premake shapes, then colouring in the shape outlined was also fairly helpful, and allowed me to be much more precise. Overall, I think I preferred the latter method, at least in this instance.

Artist Research: Wassily Kandinsky

This is an image painted by Wassily Kandinsky, a Russian painter well known for his contributions to abstract art between the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The dominant form in this piece seems to be the large, red and white coloured circle towards the top right. The black form behind it seems to resemble a spaceship in ways, relating to my piece. He also seems to make very sparing use of secondary and tertiary colours, and while they are by no means absent, primary colours overall dominate the piece. I am leaning towards using abstract art to create my final piece, so this is relevant to my project.