KISHAN THAKRAR

Evaluation - Unit 3

For this topic, I chose the theme 'Atmospheric Perspective'. At first it was because I had come to like photographing scenes with heavy atmosphere, primarily those with fog or smoke. I started by looking at artists who had captured just that. My first photoshoots were trying to capture atmosphere through photography, both in colour and in a Michael Kenna style black and white. I then moved towards looking at how atmosphere is created through other mediums, namely paintings, where I looked at Caspar David Friedrich and JMW Turner from the Romantic Period. Although there techniques were different, I was visually able to mimick their ideas and their conceptions of atmosphere, incorporating it into my own photos when capturing and editing in Photoshop. I went on to look at more contemporary photographers who capture atmospheric perspective, Dylan Furst and Andreas Wonisch. I then experimented with adding atmospheric perspective digitally. I made some particle animations which I superimposed upon images I had taken myself. The particles reflected the colours and tone of the background images. Exploring animation lead me to discover a wealth of concept artists. I found endless inspiration from various artists including Adam Brockbank and many of the artists who work for the 'Assassin's Creed' videogame franchise, especially because their work is worthless without the use of atmosphere. I went on to create concept art of my own for my final piece, using all of the skills I had learned over this project, including the initial atmospheric photography, and also using the Romantic influences to give an emotive painted look to the art. I found inspiration initially through Pinterest, and from there I found specific artists and was inspired by their work. I have learned a lot about how atmosphere has been used differently over time and also through different mediums. I discovered that the tone, composition and colour significantly impact photographs that contain atmospheric perspective, and I feel that I have appreciated atmosphere in art a lot more having researched into it; it is certainly overlooked a lot of the time. 

I created a final piece that comprises of four pieces of concept art. I used photos I had taken for each background, and then developed the image to turn it into a piece of concept art. I took lots of inspiration from the Assassin’s Creed concept artists I had previously looked at. I also created speed arts of two of the pieces, showing how much work had gone into each image, and also showing the variety of techniques I used. I gave my images a watercolour look and feel using watercolour brushes and the 'Filter Gallery' to give a painted effect. I focussed on building atmospheric perspective through concentrating on light, colour, detail and ambience. An important aspect for these images was creating depth, to prevent the piece seeming flat; this was well achieved by the concept artists I looked at, and makes a large difference to the image as a whole. I found this to be the hardest part of producing such pieces, especially when working in a 2D environment.