When you participate in any CG challenge you can be always sure it will be very difficult and require all your skills to participate and even more to win, which is best way at the moment to practice and upgrade your talent and skills.
For one CG Challenge we had to paint an artwork resembling the atmosphere of early 50-60s B-movies. At first sight it was simple to do, as always CG Challenges are, but only in few minutes, when you think about it you realized how tricky and difficult it will be. Of course the simplest approach was to paint some kind of a creature from outer space or mutated and throws it in a town with streets full of pedestrians. Truly it is something could easily be produced, but will be that enough to win the challenge? Well, maybe but I doubt it, remember those guys back in 50 had totally different imagination about future and space, we didn’t even been on a moon yet! Therefore creatures they have created are one of kind in their own class, it would be tremendous effort to created monster like that and got the same effect (silly + ridicules) today. It could be easily just too ridicules and went into primitive copy of something already existed. That’s why I dropped that idea and tried to take this subject from other side, as I always do in my challenge works.
Approach
 Most difficult moment of each work yet most important to eventually success or a loss of your artwork. To have an idea, great idea, and brilliant idea is that difference if the audience only notices your presence, give you standing ovation or simply love you forever, of course your work.
As I said I decided to take totally different approach to this one, so it took me quite a time to find brilliant idea, different than the rest of entries, original, powerful, yet still set in that b-movie mood , maybe even funny or little scary. Finally I spotted one picture on the internet.
and that’s it! I ve got my idea. From this single picture I been able to build up my entire story and finally get right motivation and atmosphere to work. And as I said it takes time to have it but it is critical to success of your work. It is not very nice to talking only in compliments about yourself, so I only give you an example of my previous “icarus day” CG Challenge entry, it was the same way of thinking and quite the same approach which made it so powerful and successful, the painting itself wasn’t even detailed and polished, the story and idea was carrying emotions strong enough to get the jury on my side. I do not know how my “9 sqrm production” will end , but that is the point, having good motivation and pleasure working on this idea it is already successful , if not to the world then at least to myself as an artist.
Story
Why this image did catch my eye. Well to be honest at first was the magnificent legs but then I like the relation between those two characters, from one side we have adult, sure, probably independent woman in some sort of sense -strong, from the other hand a fragile child playing on the floor, his perspective and world. There was also that feeling of protection from the woman to a child, I don’t even know if she is his mother but my first impression was like “heeeeeere’s mooommmmmy” and I love that to my artwork about B-movies. You see from some sort of point of view even simple play might look like catastrophe, and I did observe that when my son was playing, his bellowed kind of fun is to rip the heads of LEGO miniatures off, or throwing die cast cars around the house, recently he managed to take their tires off using his teeth. He also use to screaming during that but most remarkable thing he do is eating cookies shaped safari animals like lions , giraffes ,elephants but most favorites are turtles. So I decided go into his world and scale where he is a “giant monster” spreading chaos and destruction to a toy’s world. When I found that picture, I did create also his mother as a “monster” even more terryfying whatever that means, and my story been complete.
From the very begin of the challenge I planned to take a part in both categories, image and movie, when I found this idea for image I already had a concept for the movie too, I decided to tell the story of a little monster and his mother in the movie and show the team creating b-movie class for image category.
When I realize I would not be able to finish the movie category I was afraid if my image will be readable without this movie but I made couple clues and changes so I hope it is still quite clear what all is about. As you can see the scene is set in small room when the “team:” been filming their b-movie, each one of them using their own skills and talents, young boy is playing main character ,so does mom, and a father painting movie poster and probably been camera operator too. All decided to be painted in kind of 50s movie posters or magazines illustrations
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