Lost and Found: A Book Long Lost

Description

A rectangular notebook with dark grey hard covers. roughly 7"x10" with off-white pages. Containing miniature ‘posters’ that are adhesive on one side, haphazardly stuck on to the pages. The book is about 70/80% filled with a collection of said posters of different sizes, shapes, colors, and origin. -Lost Object of Mang Kipgen

Design Process

I began by sketching out first the shape of the book, then a new image of the book with pages, and finally composing a scene for the object to live in. Then I blocked out 2d shapes in the in sketch in order to get a better idea of what shapes I would need to create and to also make it easier to plan out what colors would go to each shape.

When it finally came to coding, I started my way from back to front in 3d space in the image, then figured out my lighting and final positioning for the book. I used the color picker in Photoshop to figure out exactly what colors I wanted to use in each section and easily get their r,g,b values.

Reflection

I found the description that my partner used to describe their lost book to be fairly straight forward and I felt there were really two ways I could take this drawing. One being to focus on the playful collage of stamps on the pages, viewing the book pretty much from straight on. The second option was to focus more on representing the object with in a scene to give the image the feeling of discovering, or remember this lost object. This second option appealed to me more conceptually as I love trying to understand and shape light in my work, and I found I was able to create what I think it a more impactful image than a straigth-on, literal representation of the book. If I were going to do it over though, I do think I want to push in more on the book to make it easier to give it more attention to detail and make it easier to understand what is on the pages. I enjoyed figuring out how to block out my image and try and create a sense of depth primarily with the shading of objects. I'm not really satisfied with the how the stamps/posters came out and I would like to be able to create a function that would randomly place them and randomly color them, but wasn't how to do that and keep the area where they would be placed confined to the surface of the top page. Or how to get the stamps/posters to follow the conture of the pages. I found that the SOFT_LIGHT blend mode was exactly what I was looking for to simulate sunlight coming in through the window.