whnvr

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I’m currently attending an art therapy group. We meet once a week and do arty things. In-between sessions we thought that, as a group, it may be fun to do regular doodles with prompts. We spun a random word selector and received the word ‘alabaster’; a type of soapstone-y, translucent material. There’s something ephemeral and time-locked about this material to me. Upon recieving the prompt I had an image appear in my mind of some vast, polished, white, futuristic thoroughfare leading towards an enormous, abstract structure made of the stuff - a street lined with collumns through which glaring sunlight streams. Some minimalist, open space from some far off future on a distant world. I did an utterly terrible initial sketch in order to capture what I mean:

The image in my mind very much reminded me of the brutalist style from the game Control, as well as some dystopian renders that I’ve come across in the past. I went to find some images to use as references along with the original material itself. Screenshots from the game Control:

Rendering references:

Alabaster material references, note the translucent and quartz-like qualities:

Before finalising the piece as a poster and uploading it there was one final task to do: ‘compositing’. The compositing part of the process can be used to do a ‘final pass’ by hand in order to add more detail. I generally use Photoshop during this stage. I simply masked out areas of the image that I felt needed a little more work,

Imported the textures that I wished to use:

Twisted them into shape:

Blended them into the image:

and then masked them out using the masks from earlier:

Lastly, I did a colour grading pass to bring out some of the qualities of the image that I wanted to see pop. Here’s a before and after for the compositing: