Collaging and Archeology (Patreon)

Lately I've been having fun making digital collages as a sort of photobash/concept art thing.

When I make models in Blender I'll sometimes refer to reference pictures for inspiration or to try and emulate some detail, but the rest is basically made off the top of my head. Making things in Blender has a particular feel. That weird, video game-y sensation that comes with stretching vertexes and selecting faces informs the final look of the model and pulls me along in a particular direction.

These crescent shapes are almost entirely because I love stretching shapes and shrinking faces into tiny points. It's satisfying for some reason.

Collage gives its own directions too. Dramatic cuts, juxtapositions, and repetitions are the joy of cutting things up in photoshop. Shapes that wouldn't suggest themselves to me in Blender make perfect sense in the context of a collage, where I can focus on a 2d image instead of rotating and revolving and battling the cube.

It's easy to throw together interesting shapes. Flip them upside down, make them smaller or larger. Decide that the crest of a helmet is now a mask and that it'd look even better if it was doubled.

Overlaying images and adjusting the opacity lets me see the same shape as polished metal or as lamellar, for instance. 

I'm hoping that I'll be able to translate the collages into models. I'll do my best to recreate what I've made through stitching together photos and drawings of the arms, armor, and random shit that's accumulated in my Ettare inspo folders.

In a funny way this has come full circle. Before I was making a game I was working on an art project with Villecallio, of Cruelty Squad fame. We were making a 3d video. It'd have environments and models made by Ville and mostly textured by me, along with voiceover that'd read text I'd written.

I've had some people express interest in that project lately, after I posted a few bits at random. In this post I'll share a lot more, some of which I don't think I ever posted anywhere.

The text was going to be a monolog from a deranged incel in a future where the world was being colonized and reshaped to emulate the world's most popular neofeudal fantasy RPG, "Sundered Greaves". The incel would be a purist, disgusted that his favorite weapons had been nerfed by IRL physics and incensed that no one was properly following the canon. To escape the LARP he planned to upload himself into the game world and leave the increasingly unreal physical world behind.

I made a bunch of collages out of video game stills, symbolist and romanticist paintings, and other random crap pulled from google image search. We had plans to use some of them as sprites, while others would be used as textures or backdrops. I had an enormous amount of fun losing myself in making collages that were meant to illustrate the inner world of a profoundly foul little man fixated on a fantasy rpg.

Covid came along and stalled the project out, largely because I ended up dropping out of school, losing my job, and going into a prolonged period of profound despair.

Ville ended up working on what would become Cruelty Squad at the tail end of this. You can see some proto-Cruelty squad graphics in these few screenshots I still have.

Ville using a collage that was meant as a 2d image to texture a blemmy (headless medieval man) is one of the things that inspired me to just use pictures I find for textures in blender.

I have a shit ton more of the old collages (of varying quality) from this project saved and if people are interested I'll throw them all in a folder and upload it somewhere. I can't find the larger text, only some fragments, but if that ever is unearthed I'd throw that in the folder too.

Now I'm once again stitching together figures for a fantasy world, but this time for an actual game rather than just a depiction of a game. There's some kind of happy closure in that for me, where that whole art experiment has paid off and given me a new technique to bring Ettare to life.

Hope you enjoyed this little peek at this "new" process and this old, orphaned work.