Tuesday 1 February 2011

Raiding The Lost Vault of Kor-Avul-Thaa

By which I mean; I have recently been searching through a portable hard-drive filled with time lost curiosities. Hidden within were various writings and pieces of art that had been left on an old house-mate's computer. Sifting through them was a bit like opening a secret portal into the past, and though it was a past not too distant, it is still a disturbing and unsettling place to visit. There were extracts from my woeful dissertation, photos of the skulls of species long extinct, and toe bones, lots of toe bones.

There was also a variety of sketches, entries into art competitions, and a collection of ideas for a Lovecraftian kid's fun activity book, which is a project I really need to revisit one day. Then there was the Random Violence art.

Random Violence is a board game being produced by a friend of mine, and back at university I was doing some artwork for it. The game was like a table-top version of Unreal Tournament, set in a near future cyber-punkish Japan. My brief was to make the character cards, which would show the character you were playing, and also be covered in lots of statistics and boxes that you would put equipment cards on and such like.

The necessity to put in lots of information goes some way towards explaining  why there is so much dead space here, but this is also due to these pieces representing my very first experiments at making art using a computer. You will notice I used colour! You will notice I didn't really know what I was doing! You will notice I haven't worked this way since!