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Specialism: Prop Design Week 1 and 2
For this art test, I chose 2 of 4 briefs, both under prop design. One featured a Victorian aesthetic, the other a more futuristic one. Personally, I detest guns and find them dull, so I decided to design the most fabulous gun I could. I'm also not a fan of sci-fi, so decided to tackle that in creation of a crate.Starting with the Victorian object, I roughed some silhouettes on items I thought were interesting of the time, in shape and form.
Having decided to go with the gun idea, I used silhouettes and a digital collage technique new to me, which was helpful in its own ways.
Roughing some ideas further in my sketchbook, I was very drawn to the idea of an eel gun. It was madcap and had historical relevence, there being an influx of eels during the Victorian times. What do you do with so many eels? You weaponise them. Liking the fact electricity had to be cranked to use a Victorian phone, I added that to the gun, wanting it to have be a four-barreled blunderbus after looking into guns and how they worked and what might work the best, the wide nozzle of this particular gun making the most sense.
Having roughed more ideas, considering other things like Queen Victoria's jubilee ( a royal gun seeming reason for elaborate design), I decided to go forward and model and paint over my strongest idea.
With an eel tank on the top and a crank on the side, I felt this worked. But then, how would it be carried? How would it be used? Surely its too heavy, too large? So I worked on some further concepts.
Then, size in mind, I looked into flamethrowers of WW1 and a tank strapped to the back of the user made more sense, though the idea of a horse -drawn-eel-spewing-turret-carriage was compelling.
Using Maya further, I developed the small zapgun like gun through iteration, closely studying a book on Victorian Stencils, developing them into forms of the gun, elaborate patterns becoming scopes and adornments.
The idea of the back pack was to have it as a refurbished coffin, being quite common in this era in not having enough graves for bodies. The size would have to be that of a child, made of metal, which was seemingly common in the bourgeois.
So here we have my eel gun. The main idea with this brief was that there was an organic element of the item that was rotting and causing it to malfunction. Ignoring science, the gun would be used with live eels as a sort of Victorian taser, a crank electrifying the eels. But in Frankenstein fashion, electrifying dead eels brings them back to life, free to spread a vast zombie-eel plague. In hindsight, a plague mask should really have accompanied this item.
The next item being sci-fi, it has to be a crate holding a deadly substance that's been badly damaged, the substance now leaking.
From silhouettes, to sketches, to iteration. I was very taken with the more Utopian route of robotics seen in curves, beveled edges and a prominence of white. Portal, I-Robot and Wall-E's Eve being points of reference.
A sci-fi crate that prisons a liquid monstrosity, bullet holes allowing tentacles to slip out, explosives opening whole segments and a crudely hacked and broken control panel.
Despite not really ever tackling props, I've really enjoyed this. Though some texture studies would help me out a lot!
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