Schiele goes out with her mate Stella

Now that the Master Class project is complete, I have started making some decent progress on my Innovations. After a couple meetings with my tutor, I have decided to go down a more experimental route. Using the work of Egon Schiele as a starting point, my plan is to imagine how he would utilize today's technology. 

For hundreds of years painting was a medium used to try and accurately depict real life. It wasn't really until the invention of the camera that more expressionist artists appeared, who distorted the real world for emotional effect. I intend to draw parallels between painting and CG, a relatively young medium, which has I feel has not been exploited for all its potential as a platform for expressionism. It seems as if there has become a standard aesthetic that the majority of work tends to adhere to, imitating the Pixar style of clean, perfect animation. Using contemporary artists such as David O'Reillyand Mark Napier as inspiration, I want to play with the idea of things you are and aren't supposed to do, and break the rules. Intersecting meshes, low poly models, tangled vertices, faces deleted here and there. A show reel of beautiful chaos. HOWEVER, first I want to do it 'properly' and show the process of destruction, a kind of before and after, and argue which is more interesting as a piece of art.

 I thought about the features which I feel identifies Sheile's work as his own, in particular his portraiture. The subject is always distorted in some way, stretched and twisted, with limbs body parts bent and buckled, often depicted with harsh edges, and dark outlines. Sometimes entire parts are neglected, either not drawn or left uncoloured. This 'unfinished' look is something I plan to experiment with, maybe leaving patched of wireframe visible underneath the surface of the mesh.

So far, as a starting point, I have modeled a head based on Schiele's portrait of the artist Karl Zakovsek. I've slapped a couple ramp shaders on and used contour rendering for the lines. My next step is to texture it and basically muck around in ZBrush, maybe make some more models, see what happens and kind of play it by ear until it looks how I want it too. Might even animate it if I have time. Fun improvising!