Methods of Iterating

Week 1

I chose to learn Blender for Methods of Iterating.

It was a bit like the “wiggle your big toe” scene from Kill Bill Vol 1.

I was really struggling at first to do simple things which was so infuriating. I couldn’t move around the scene, I couldn’t scale objects properly. It felt like there was a big disconnect between what I wanted to do and what would come out.

I started with the humble Blender donut

I wanted to recreate “Traveler” by Alex Colville using Blender. His art style has always looked like it was created in a PS2—it all looks so low poly and liminal—very off-putting in a very entrancing way. His use of perspective and material was what I wanted to re-create in Blender.

The final result was an animation where I brought the viewer out of the painting that Colville had created and into the world so to speak.

Week 2

Following week 1, I wasn’t exactly sure where to go or what to do. I began just by creating something that would make me laugh, because I had spent so much time and energy to get to the animation I made the week prior.

At this point I had no idea where to go with the project. Nothing felt like a hack of Blender—It felt like I had just discovered how to use google or wikipedia for the first time, there were no bounds to what this software could do, so could I really push the limits of what it was designed to do?

I began with the idea of creating something analogue in a virtual space. I had considered trying to create a film photo with the correct grain and halation from a film photo, but I feared that I would not be able to create models that were good enough to photograph (even low poly).

The other idea that I had thought of was virtual letterpress. In the world of graphic design, letterpress is to film photography as digital print is to digital photography. Both letterpress and film photography are lauded for their subtle qualities and such as grain and colour science in film photography, as well as the texture and debossed effect of text for letterpress. Digital photography and even less so digital print have very few admirers or cult like fans like letterpress and film photography have. My idea was to combine the extremely digital nature of low poly, early 2000’s 3D graphics with the tactile look and feel of letterpress in Blender.

second method of letterpress, using a shader system to create bump map and ink effect

outcome that inspired the following week’s work

Following the discussion of this work, I realised that the imperfections were While I was making this week’s

While I was making this week’s iterations, I was trying to do two things at once: grow my skills and create something that would show this, but also pay homage to the digital aspect of it all. I chose Blender because I believe that digital aesthetics are the black sheep in the world of graphic design and photography and I wanted to pay homage to and celebrate digital artefacts as much as analogue aesthetics are celebrated.

There’s a certain pretentiousness and inaccessibility of film photography and letterpress in the art world; some of it due to very logical constraints (letterpress studios need to be physically accessed, dying art form so there aren’t many left) but also there’s a certain set of rules of engagement with these mediums, things that are faux pas. There are large systems one must learn how to be a part of around these mediums that exist because they’ve been around so long.

There was so much freedom when digital tools first came into the designer’s toolset because nobody really knew how they worked or how they functioned. The digital works that came out of this era were not the most pristine or high resolution but were widely circulated and loved because they represented possibility, the future, newness.

My goal with creating these works was to challenge the notion of what artefacts from processes could be celebrated—why do we draw the line when the process goes from analogue to digital? What if I create the same effect (letterpress) but I do it digitally? Is the image still exciting? Is it still worthy of celebration?

Week 3

continuing iterating with the same method of using bump maps to create letterpress, and changing the resolution up and down to look at how it changed the meaning of the images

going back to method one, which was me cutting a cube using text to create actual 3D letterforms rather than the illusion of doing so. As I was moving the camera, I thought it would be really interesting visually to get as close as possible to the letterforms—trying at one point to step into the typographic valleys and crevices I had just created and photograph them as if they were natural forms.

more iterations using the initial method, but this time I successfully got the text to bevel, creating the correct debossed look that analogue letterpress makes.

attempting to do letterpress as low poly as possible, as the higher the face count the more glitches (often times no image could be rendered at all) there would be. this created an interesting limitation but an even more interesting outcome.

my favourite outcome, I was attempting to get inside the letterforms again as I had done earlier in the week, but this time I forgot to set the clip distance correctly and the camera clipped through the surface of the cube, creating this impossible effect where the shadows and highlights are rendered, but the surface surrounding them doesn’t exist in a physical sense.

Final outcome

I created a finalised product from these experiments — a type spec sheet, but I wanted to go a step further

I created a zine/publication to display my work. I wanted to see what it would look like printed, if the digital letterpress would translate on paper. I’m not entirely convinced that a publication is/was the best medium to display this type of work as the images feel decidedly less involving and enticing on paper at this scale.