So today I left the home for my project work with my heart heavy and worried, after my big argument with the project leader last week there had been no contact at all and I worried that there would be hushed tones when I arrived. When I arrived there was a lack of eye contact for a while but it got better. However the most important part of the day is how I left the project work. I was elated, the happiness I felt was almost more than I could possibly express in words.
So the pressing questions is why?
It's quite simple, you see I'm a designer really when things come down to it. I understand how line and colour and shape all work together (even if I don't always get it completely right). Although I sometimes claim it loudly I am not an artist. Why do I make this difference? Because I can make something that is functional or pretty, but I cannot make emotion.
So I bet you can guess why I was elated? That's right, I created emotion in a piece. Namely the emotion of fear and horror : glee :.
Instead of just showing you the work I'd rather show you examples leading up to its creation. So here we go!
About 5 months ago in a Photoshop creative magazine (I got it two months ago, it's a British magazine =P) there was some excerpts about making grunge images. Basically the idea of it is to combine textures and occasionally text to get a collage / grunge feel to the image, it's really fun and easy. After some experimentation I really started to get a feel for the layering effect and I wanted to make a more relaxing image that represented my love for reading and nature. This ended up being something I really liked, it gave it a dark fantasy novel feel (as a friend commented yesterday).
The dark forest
So this was left in the past and the result was sitting happily in my self made folder for months. Today I realised that desperately needed to work my project team's website. Now I can't mention too much about the project except for the fact that it's basically a psychological horror game. So I'm the multimedia guru for this thing and I have been reluctant to work on the page itself for fear of an inability to create horror.
Eventually after working on business cards and just generally doing things that don't need doing I thought I should probably go and try this work. Part of the game includes whispering voices and the like to really make a horror feel. So I'm looking through my work and I find this one particular picture I love, words carved haphazardly on the wall of a prison. It has a real angry feel to it, and I think yeah that would be great. First experiment!
Horror Forest
I was pretty happy with, not estatic but still pretty happy. So I kept working and experimenting with it and I came up with this proof I could do it.
Horror
And that's what I ended up with, lots of darkness and burns in the images to generally give this feel. I was pretty happy, still not as happy as I was when I left uni. How did I reach this level?
Simple.
When I was showing this to my project manager (University lecturer) she informed me that the trees and hallway were actually making her feel uneasy. Now she's not the image you would imagine for someone who would love to watch horror things (she reminds me a lot of Alyson Hannigan in "How I met your mother") but the idea that my work could promote that kind emotion enough to disturb someone? So awesome.
So that's my day =) Hope all yours was just as good!
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