BBC: What If? Competition

I decided to respond to the 'What If?' competition brief. This involved producing an artistic response to 'your' vision of the future. I chose to create a large matte painting, depicting a rather negative vision of the future:

Here is the description I used when uploading my piece to 'Deviantart':

'Here is my vision of the future. A fleet of ships inhabited by the wealthy and successful departs over a slum, consumed by pollution created as a result of the greed surrounding multinational corporations. The people who destroyed the planet now head for new land as the poor look on from the mess that their leaders created.'

Linking in with theories form our context of practice module, I wanted to depict what I believe to be the final outcome of multi-national globalisation. This piece is set in an indian slum, with a large western power plant spilling pollution into the surroundings. Contrasting with the bleak foreground, extravagant golden ships depart into the distance. This fits with the idea that companies making enormous profit, neglect the environment for as longs as resources are still available. At this point in the future, planet earth has been ruined by the enormous carbon footprint left by large industry. Carelessly, the rich and wealthy simply leave to find a new planet in which they can deplete its resources with no reflection on the destruction of earth.

After gaining feedback from a tutor, it has come to my attention that I need to revise fundamental drawing skills. The perspective of the piece is slightly off, meaning it is hard to distinguish wether the ships are in-front of or behind the cliff. As far as the colours and value control goes, I feel the mood of the piece is fairly successful. I would have liked to have added more detail to the slums, and perhaps included more custom brushes to achieve various different textures and details. Conceptually, I am quite happy with the message conveyed behind the piece, and feel that I am making steps towards improving my skills as a concept artist.

I feel that what I need to do now is hone in the fundamental skills required to draw successfully. I have familiarised myself with efficient Photoshop tools such as masks, adjustment layers and blend modes, I now need to take a step back and study traditional life drawing. This will broaden my visual vocabulary, and drastically improve the standard of my work. It seems nothing is more important than composition and accuracy with perspective, no matter how many custom brushes or adjustment layers are applied.