Surface Design Study - Crown of Thorns

October 05, 2022

Surface Design Study - Crown of Thorns

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For this project, we were tasked with creating a surface design inspired by patterns we found in our daily lives - while I did find a good amount of references, I ended up going in a completely different direction (which is pretty on brand for me).

Real life references

Instead of a repeating pattern like a lot of my references, I was inspired while doing more research by both the sort of chunkier style of stained glass windows, as well as the circular/array patterns on some of the tarot cards found in the game Dragon Age: Inquisition; while some of my original concepts also included a figure in the middle, I wasn't really a fan and decided to just stick with my original idea. This eventually branched into the final, where I ditched the daintier lines in favor of a more modern graphic with thick lines and bold colours.

tarot cards

stained glass

In this project, I had 2 major problems: keeping track of all my layers, and knowing when to stop. As a digital artist you'd think I would know to keep track of which layer I was on, but I still managed to do half of this project on the wrong layers without realizing! Because of my indecisiveness, there is also multiple final versions of this project as I couldn't decide which one I liked the best; while I picked the header image as the final, there is also a more complex and a lineless version.

The top one was just too many circles and the bottom one (lineless) was starting to remind me of a biblically accurate angel for some reason? Which considering how 2022 has been going so far I really didn't want to invoke 😃

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Some Process Stuff

Here's some more parts of my process, including the curves and a couple other views.