At the time, i was pretty bored with the trend of vehicle design prevalent in films and games. I saw that there were alot of talented concept designers I was working with had exceptional rendering and painting skills. However I felt that something was amiss as their 2 dimensional renderings were translated into 3 dimensional forms. I was of the opinion that they had became overly focused on the rendering techniques and not enough on the forms themselves.
I'm still not sure what set me off in this direction but i remembered a little store in the East Bay across from Marin that sold animal skeletons and other natural artifacts. I went there and picked up some small bird and mammalian skulls as well as some rubber gloves. When i got back to the art dept. at ILM, i quickly cut up the gloves into rubber sheets and proceeded to wrap it around the skulls. The following image is the result of one of these experiments, backlit by the luxo lamp at my desk and photographed with a cheapo digital camera.
I found that i loved working this way. It was a very different approach - instead of pulling the forms from myself which ran the risk of being derivative, I "found" the forms in natural shapes in front of me. I wasn't "rendering" as much as "finding". I tried various layers of skin on top of the skulls, letting the backlight scatter through the shape "carving" it and revealing a depth that suggested something else altogether. In some other images i added little details like windows which gave these images an immense sense of scale and other worldliness.
In hindsite I'm glad i did not participate in that project but I was really happy with these explorations and still hope to use them somehow one day.
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