Art has many aspects to it that can be immersive and I wanted to experiment with trying out interactive art pieces. Art can be so many things from the design of a videogame to fine art to animated pieces. This fact could lead to many different media pieces being designed to immerse an audience into an artistic environment whether it be a videogame world or a live event. Art had been ingrained into such a cast amount of cultures and has been around for centuries whether through stories painted on cave walls all the way up to modernised art of animation and digitised art pieces. Therefore within this research and experimentation blog I discover the different immersive or interactive software's that art can be created within.
Live Events:
Art and Immersive events are unique ways to bring animated art even more to life. One of the main ways to immerse an audience within a location based event would be to use projection mapping. Project mapping can make animations be able to surround an audience and in some cases even interact with the viewer. This tool is a fascinating way to completely immerse an audience in the located environment and keep their attention on the art piece.
Art has always been a really effective way of captivating people's attention. It's part of the reason the art exhibits and museums exist; to tell the lost story of art pieces and people. Therefore finding new innovative ways to use this concept to enchant and enrapture an audience would continue this idea of telling stories through new and older types of art. Animated pieces such as the Butterfly Trails have created this animated live event to capture this exact concept and it is a highly effective art exhibit that highlights the beauty of an architecture with the projected animated butterflies and also using AR technology so you can somewhat interact with the butterflies within the piece.
Animations and Procreate:
Procreate and procreate dreams art based programs that have tools that are able to create a range of different styles of art or animation pieces depending on the artist using them. This is important as to convert art or animation into an immersive setting you first have to find a way to create the art pieces, which these software’s are powerful tools for people to do this. Due to this I wanted to experiment with both of these software's as I had not previously used these to create art or animations.
Procreate has been a highly powerful art program for several years and due to this people have been using it to create short animated pieces, however recently the team behind Procreate, alongside several designers, launched Procreate Dreams which is a software for hand drawn digital art. As I had not used this software before, due to it being almost brand new, I needed to learn the way that it varies from other animation platforms such as Adobe Animate and how to overall use this new platform, therefore I looked into what each part of the software can do and what I could create with it.
Therefore after finding animations that others have created within the platform as well as information of how it worked I started to feel as though I could start to experiment with it and possibly create a fully animated piece once I had learnt the main mechanics of the app. If I did create an animated piece as a major project I would need to look at how I could fully immerse an audience with it whether that be making it interactive such as a branching narrative style animation or bring it into software such as VR or even use AR or projection mapping to create it into a live event.
Animation is such an influential tool for immersion and storytelling, this has been the case since the first animation came about. There Have been thousands of different art style animations that have been highly successful ranging from video-game animations such as the Spiritfarer (Thunder Lotus, 2023) to Studio Ghibli style animations.
Interactive Zoom Art:
Outside of animation there are other ways to make immersive interactive art such as Endlesspaper’s infinite zoom. This style of art allows the user to pick what part of the art they zoom into and allows them to be immersed into a range of different narratives that the artist has purposely set up for them. This can be done in a range of ways whether the artist sets up a linear story through the viewer's interaction of picking a particular path to zoom into or a non-linear narrative where the art sets the audience up to have options giving them a sense of power over the art and storyline.
This software allows art that could be designed to make branching interactive narratives. This allows the audience to connect to a story and almost be the narrator or part of the story themselves making them immersed as part of the plot of the story. The overall effect is all done through a simple app, this concept would be even more immersive if it could be done within a VR or AR environment, where the audience could almost physically be within the pieces of art.
Videogames:
Alongside this gaming has become one of the most popularised experiences within today's immersive products, especially those within VR. These are probably one of the most immersive types of technology for storytelling creating environments and tales that an audience can be transported into. Games can use the idea of branching narratives as well as non linear stories to immerse their audience within its game.
So combining animation, art and games could be a highly effective medium for immersion due to the fact that it uses creative environments to involve the audience in. Using these styles and plotlines to form a story around an audience, some of these games do this through environments, characters or even breaking the 4th wall.
Games such as Far: alone sails, Life is Strange and so forth have used the technique of using the environment as a major part of its storytelling to keep their players immersed. If the story is engaging enough for the audience they can create the illusion of being fully immersed within the world created.
VR:
Immersive art could involve VR animation and games such as Half Life where within a virtual reality setting you can be the main character within a whole storyline. Along with this this type of art allows us, as the consumer, to be part of the environment and see this whole other environment that we would never get to experience within our reality. This way of immersion for art is an extremely effective way to pull an audience completely into a narrative and allows them to experience a whole other story other than the life they are currently living.
My Process:
In order to create any form of immersion I knew I had to start off by familiarising myself with art software's such as Procreate. Therefore, as my process I started off by testing out procreate for creating digital art. As someone who has mainly used Photoshop and other Adobe Cloud software to create digital art, this software is quite different to that of Adobe, however I did not have many issues going into the software and managed to quickly learn the main aspects of Procreate to create art.
So, for my first attempt using the software I went with using one brush type and no colour to see what sort of details and textures I could create using a very limited part of the software. After doing this I gained an idea of how to create simple art within the canvas. As you can see below I immediately started off just designing a black and white sketch to fully understand the basics of the software before I went in to create anything more detailed.
Once I understood what Procreate was capable of and its limitations, I started to sketch more within the software to just practise more with the other aspects of the program. I often find the constant practice with the software helps me develop my skills within art software’s. Therefore I started to do a little sketching within the software to practise with the brushes and other aspects of the app.
After experimenting and starting off with the software, I created a fully developed art piece to fully put my art skills into using the program. This ended up allowing me to experiment with different brushes, textures and lighting that I previously had not had the chance to use. This piece ended up taking around 2 to 3 hours in total to complete after I spent time experimenting with different aspects that Procreate has within its app. After I had finished this I continued to experiment not only with character designs but with creating background as well. This allowed me to easily learn how quickly I would be able to make a striking scene using only this software and my art skills.
I wanted to create a prototype for animation so I created storyboard ideas for different types of animations I could create when moving on to Procreate Dreams. I did this so I would have a direction to go towards when entering this other software that I had not explored yet. Also, by doing this I could begin to formulate a plan for immersive and interactive animations or projects that I could create so I could begin to visualise how I would go about making each scene or section of a project, below is one of the examples of the storyboard processes that I did early on.
Once I had several different storyboard ideas I began an animation project, which you can see a sneak peak off below. I however did not have time to fully finish this for this immersive labs project, so I will talk about what I have accomplished using the software. I started off relearning basic animation using the piece where I began to familiarise myself with the different aspects of Dreams. I did this as the layout and structure of the software is completely different to that of other software's that I had previously used. Once I had explored the different aspects of the animation software I began to use my storyboard ideas to plot out a full animation scene. Even though I did not end up completing this it was super helpful trying to develop this to learn about the software and I hope to fully develop an animation within it to use for a project within the upcoming year.
My Brief Experiment with Dreams:
To conclude my experience when it comes to Procreate I think that the software is highly creative software, specifically when it comes to art and could certainly contribute towards creating some interesting pieces or scenes, especially for transferring to become animated. I would definitely continue to create art within the app and learn different ways to formulate my art from it to become an immersive project.
After experimenting with animation I also wanted to start to produce ideas and things for a prototype so I started with creating a sketch version of a sketched infinite branching narrative piece on Endlesspaper, as you can see below. I will further explore the concept of this and branching narratives within the next blog about my prototype and explore how I could use this in immersive softwares.
However, to briefly explain this, I designed this piece with no particular narrative I mind and due to my limited time I had I only did a sketch version to show an example of what I could create, if I were to improve upon this or do this again I would create piece with more detail and have a set branching narrative in mind so that each section flowed better. Despite this I did this as a base for a prototype idea to demonstrate what could come out of a branching narrative art piece.
My final prototype:
Conclusion:
To sum up when it comes to art there are many different software's and mediums that can be used when creating immersive art and this would certainly be a journey of creations that I would want to explore further. Even though art as well as animation has a range of different mediums that involve immersive and interactive aspects I would want to explore how this artistic side of immersive software can create captivating environments and form a way to immerse an audience in my art whether that would be through a small video-game or through projecting one of my animations.
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