Artist Critique

artist critique.

jonathan ball.

Jonathan Ball is a Welsh freelance illustrator as well as being the owner and force behind Poked Studio, a graphic design company who create innovative visuals for clients. Ball has  done work for some incredibly big names, including but not limited to MTV, Sony Playstation, Microsoft and the BBC. He creates some truly mind blowing 3D computer generated art by using a free 3D graphic software.

His works, as previously stated, are fairly incredible. Everything is very far out there, bright and vivid and draws your eye in to see how far the detail goes. In a word it’s a marketing masterpiece and as a result his works are very topical currently, hence why he’s had so much work from big names. Being in that the majority of his work is commissioned it could be hard for him to have a unique art style but regardless of this he seems to have a tendency to produce pieces with a childish feel to them, but on further inspection it’s easy to see that his works are so much more. There’s incredible attention to detail and generally an astoundingly high level of quality to each and every aspect of the work he makes.

To make his works, Ball mainly uses Blender, a free to use software that allows people to create 3D models and fully render them as well as having the ability to animate creations. Ball also uses photoshop and employs the method of spamming several layers with subtle differences to make a variety of different shadows and lighting effects with minimal time investment needed.

Ball’s works seem to have an ongoing undertone of surrealism, be it through the input of a huge cartoon rabbit or a teddybear wielding robot. I’m unsure of any artists of yesteryear to  compare him to as his works are so current both in their construction and theme and also very unique in their art-style. I believe his art to be an incredibly refreshing look into the future for both surrealism and generally art. He’s making great use of the technology available to him and driving his art forward and keeping it fresh and unique as well as hugely appealing to the public. I believe his work will continue to evolve and push forward the standard to which all art will be critiqued. Though I’ve only just stumbled upon him recently I plan on heeding a lot of his advice for my future works as well as taking a fairly substantial amount of inspiration from his works and style.

Through my research I’ve thoroughly enjoyed critiquing his works and attempting to make sense of the inner workings of his brain. Though not every piece seems to have a deeper meaning they definitely have a very aesthetically pleasing feel to them in their rendering, layout and construction. It’s easy to see a huge amount of thought, time and effort has gone into everything he produces and as such he’s very inspirational. 

Step by step and evaluation

Both posters make use of a method called vectorization, in which an image is given an almost cartoon style. I'm going to briefly outline the steps required to vector an image as doing every step would take up a huge amount of space and time.

- Open your chosen photo and use it as a background

- Using the pen tool, outline and fill the face, hair, eyebrows, ears and mouth respectively, using a different layer for everything to ease future alterations and fill colours depending on skin tone, hair colour etc.

- Outline and fill the eyes in white.

- Outline the bottom of the eyes and 'Make Selection' in preparation for shading, use the original photo as reference. Then swap to the face layer and using low exposure use the burn tool to darken the skin tone as shading.

- Outline the top of the eyes and fill black to simulate eyelashes.

- Carefully erase any obvious overlaps

- Once more using the photo as reference, outline and fill both the iris and pupil, each on their own layer.

- To add depth, outline the highlighting within the eye and fill white, again on its own layer.

- Outline the nostrils and contours of the nose on the face layer, 'make selection', then use command+M to bring up the curves menu and slightly darken to simulate the interior and exterior of the nostrils. Do these in separate steps if different tones are needed.

- Using the burn tool again, add shadow on the face layer everywhere on the face where it seems appropriate, taking into consideration that less can be more. Also burn around the corners of the mouth.

- Use the pen tool on the mouth layer to outline the middle of the mouth. 'Make selection' and command+M to slightly darken the space between top and bottom lip.

- Use the burn tool on the mouth layer to darken the corners of the lips.

- Whilst on the hair layer, use the pen tool to outline and fill any more detail that may've been missed out on the hair.

- Command click the hair layer to outline the hair, swap to the face layer and drag down to simulate shade below the hair. Command+M and darken the face in the highlighted area.

This finishes the basic vectorised portrait. From here it's just adding the background. For this I firstly saved, then merged all my layers in preparation for pasting over to a new A3 file. I won't include images for these steps as I feel they're rather self explanatory.

- Over several layers, add a series of overlapping and varying coloured shapes, in my case circles.

- Place layers above each shape and paste in a texture, change the blending mode to overlay and turn down the opacity and fill levels.

- Erase all overlaps.



Final collages:

I'm going to evaluate these collages as a pair as they both make use of the same techniques.

In both my collages I attempted to make a decent looking vector portrait. The first I tried to have show some personal passions through the use of overlays on the background. The second I tried to use a single base colour with one other to add emphasis and a highlight.

In the first collage I used textures of oil paint and canvas as a metaphor for a passion for art. I believe that these elements are prominent enough to be noticeable yet subtle enough to not be overpowering and take away from the layout of the piece. I believe this collage went well and it's by far my favoured of the two. 

In the second collage I used an image of a cloudy sky and put on a filter to make it seem grainy, I then overlayed a rendered wall texture over the top entirely for aesthetics. I then changed the hue of my portrait image to match the blue tones of the sky whilst allowing the eyes to be the one part of the collage with a different colour. I then put on a texture to simulate screen grain. I feel this piece to be a metaphor for disassociation with the world through the use of technology, whether anyone can see this metaphor remains to be seen though.

As a total project I feel this went very well. I now have a decent understanding of the method of producing vector graphic images and could do it fairly quickly if needed to. That being said I have reservations about my results, I feel the second collage doesn't really do my attempts justice as it doesn't really work in my eyes, that may just be due to how the portrait came out or possibly the layout.