Kill This Dawn
末 日 黎 明
"Kill This Dawn" IB Art Exhibition
Year: 2020 Medium: Digital Painting (Photoshop + Procreate) & Acrylic
Concept Art + Character Design, Inspired by Cyberpunk, Inu Curry, and Impressionism
"Red Crown Crane: DanDing Hong 丹顶红"
Year: 2020 Medium: Digital Drawing: Photoshop + Procreate Size: 61.16 * 52.93 cm
This piece is a character design of a personified animal, Red Crown Crane. The Red Crown Crane is an endangered species in China, and the animal has been well known since the ancient Chinese history of their beauty and rareness. The character is designed with Red Crane characteristics, such as long legs, similar wings, and the redhead has been transformed into a stripe of red hair on the top of her head. The design language is based on futuristic elements of machinery, metallics, free-floating robotics, and artificial intelligence in the structure of wings, weapons, and clothes. This piece challenges to create a new culture out of the characteristics of the Red Crown Crane, and the futuristic styles of artificial intelligence. This character is also implied in and connected to other pieces in this exhibition. This character "Dan Ding Hong" is created in the story by humans with the function to communicate with wild animals. This character design also seeks to raise the audience's awareness of the environmental threats to Red Crown Cranes.
"Show Yourself"
Year: 2020 Medium: Digital Drawing: Photoshop + Procreate Size: 143.39 * 100.63 cm
This piece “show yourself” has an emphasis on the free expression of the character’s body language, including her spreaded wings, and freely opened gestures to the unknown. The central theme of my painting is the express the character’s free and courageous personality in showcasing her abilities and unique characteristics to the world, thus encouraging the audience to be themselves and be proud of their body features, and ultimately their true identities.
"Ornamental"
Year: 2020 Medium: Digital Painting: Procreate Size: 35.8 * 19.6 cm
"Ornamental" sets place in a story created along with the exhibition, that when humans lost power and emotions in the future due to the overly developed technologies and mutation in certain animals' genes. In this piece, the character walking with heels is the character designed in the previous piece of "Red Crown Crane". The GoldFish behind is following her step to observe and check the city. The proportion of the piece emphasize the tininess and insignificance of human even if they have advanced technology. The piece is called "Ornamental" because it tends to mock the fact that in real life, goldfish are ornamental fish for the human to observe, watch, and monitor, but its the opposite in the painting oppositely. This piece is based on surrealism, and colors are inspired by the style of cyberpunk and the colors of dawn. "Ornamental" also intends to deliver an irony that humans are conceited with self-righteousness to control and monitor animals' lives superficially with harmful power practices.
"Road of Despair"
Year: 2020 Medium: Digital Painting: Procreate Size: 39.7 * 26.9 cm
I formed this idea initially by seeing an incomplete structure of a bridge in my home country, China, in a form that resembles a large animal’s bone structure. I imagined a world setting that human uses animals as resources and dead animals’ bone structures in society because they are easy to obtain and full of using potentials. This world setting discusses the greediness of human nature, and my goal is to design a concept art of a world like this to inform the audience to remain empathetic for animals’ lives and put the focus on sustainable resources. This is a continued concept from the previous piece “ornamental”. I drew multiple layers using the chalk paintbrush to establish a realistic texture of animals’ bones and used brightened layers to create shining effects of the bridge with the sun’s light and reflection. I imagined and referenced a golden ratio in my head during the process to create an aesthetically pleasing and harmonious structure of my image to the audience.
Inspirations, original sketches, initial plans and design from process portfolio
