| | |  | | Lighting the stage |
| The uncontrolled process
"We can experiment with various levels of control before getting the results into the computer," says Stefankova. "The main purpose for this is to keep a pure authenticity of various levels of brain control. The basis is an old-fashioned pen or pencil drawing, which allows a humans spontaneity to flow in any situation and condition. There’s also no need to be in a room or certain equipped space."
"In this case it is about a collaboration of the uncontrolled processes of the human brain with opposed methods and exact scientific discoveries. The experiment explores the boundaries and possibilities of unbinding from the ratio driven creative process, but we don’t try to eliminate the effect of art education, personal predispositions and corrections."
"In fact, in our world we are witnesses to hundreds of daily unconscious notes about our own psychical and physical worlds – many people tend to doodle even if they don’t think it’s a drawing while chatting with a friend on the phone, while listening a lecture at school, etc."
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| | | "The artist‘s goal is to collect the fragments of life and situations, which are difficult to catch in material – maybe it’s a drawing of crying after a bad day, or a drawing of traveling on a London train while on my morning way to work when people are stressed and sleepy in that particular moment, or maybe a drawing of happiness or boring stuff. As the artist I am only a medium reflecting and reporting. It’s about the society; it’s about me as a deep self-portrait."
"This is similar to the fine artists of the past reflecting their era and deflecting from a pure imitation of nature (mimesis) to deform the reality with their own perception and psychic processes. Now I’d like to bring the same purpose to digital art, which “as an attractive and eye catching form” can be effective more than anything else nowadays," says Stefankova. | | |  | | Sketches |
|  | | Random coloring detail. |
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 | | Sketches |
| | | Building the CGI form – control the uncontrolled.
The final stage of building the shapes in the CGI form is then refined so a visually interesting and balanced image is achieved. The process of redrawing the stuff in computer is pretty straight forward, begins with cleaning up the sketch and getting rid of everything unneccessary.
The most important part here is coloring based on lighting rendered in passes, texturing and post production. Playing with color is random. A simple lighting rig was created by London based lighting TD Roman Vrbovsky and rendered with mental ray within Softimage|XSI.
Digital art is a method of communication.
Digital art should be about finding appropriate forms to address feelings, meanings, questions and answers to a wider audience. It's not just the creation of art essentially, it’s about ideas visualized and refined that have a value so the artist is listened and accepted while he speaks. The thoughts are delivered, perceived and judged. Similarly like Damien Hirst provoked the attention of curators, media and even the wider audience – this is how his thoughts became important and real. |  | | Textures used. |
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 | About the artist
Born in 1978 Petra Stefankova is a London based Slovakian illustrator, designer and animation art director, Fellow of Royal Society of Arts in London and Channel 4's 4Talent Award winner in 2007. She works in animation, advertising and publishing industry for clients such as the BBC, Columbia Pictures, The Economist, Channel 4, Fremantle Media etc.
From a thousands of entrants she was also selected to exhibit her digital art on environment issues in the exhibition Common Ground 2008 which will be running across museums and galleries in China in 2008, Europe in 2009 and the USA in 2010. | | | | | |
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