Art Direction: What inspires me?

What is Art Direction?

Taking a small break from looking at easter eggs and cheat codes I would like to take this opportunity to quickly put up this post. As part of our critical studies module we were asked to do a presentation on art direction and outline what personally inspires us as artists. I don't have a strong art background so this was particularly hard at first. To start off the task I had to understand what exactly art direction is.

Art direction is just what it says on the tin - direction of art. It is the process of making art as beautiful, meaningful and rich as possible. It starts off with taking an idea and then visually taking this idea to another level. For most art this means looking at perspective, colour, composition and other elements that make up the piece.

The Beauty of Nature
After I established the meaning of art direction I then sat down to think of something that inspires me so that I would have an example to talk about and although it took me a long time I finally managed to find out why I was struggling with this so much. The answer is that everything inspires me! After spending hours looking through different mediums of art and not being able to decide on a particular topic I noticed that everything is interesting in its own unique way. Finally I decided to just pick something that stands out for me personally - Nature.

Nature constantly surrounds us and from an early age on-wards we are being inspired by it. Many great designs are influenced by nature itself and that's why I like it so much. The shapes and colours of our natural surroundings can be astonishingly beautiful and interesting. I decided to look at a particular photographer who is able to capture nature's beauty perfectly in form of photographs. His name is George Saad and his work can be found here: http://lowapproach.deviantart.com/

For the purpose of my presentation I picked out a particular image which stood out from the rest to me because of the use of composition, lightning and colour. It can be found here: http://lowapproach.deviantart.com/art/Tree-Of-Light-48680409

Composition
Looking at the composition within the photograph it is quite obvious that the main focus of the image is in the middle of the picture. George Saad made this clear by using the tree in the foreground as well as the sun behind it and placing them both into the centre of the picture. Using the rule of thirds you can also see that the horizon line perfectly lines up with the lower third of the picture, while the sun marks the line between the top two thirds.




Colour
While the picture isn't particularly vivid in colour it does have a nice range of tones, ranging from near complete black to a very bright yellowish colour. This is most noticeable in the sky, which has a nice gradient. There also seems to be a bit of a glow around the trees, which gives the image a beautiful touch and adds a bit of depth. The trees themselves are nearly completely black and almost look like simple silhouettes, which is caused by the camera looking directly into the sun.




Lightning
The photograph was taken either during the early morning or late evening. The low sun creates long, smooth shadows that cover almost all of the floor. As I mentioned before the trees seem to have a glow around them, which might also be caused by this. I personally really like the mood that the lightning brings to this picture.




Conclusion
All in all I think that the picture is quite beautiful and George Saad has done a good job in portraying the whole feel that this kind of scene would bring to the viewer. He has achieved this by using art direction and carefully considering each the components of the image itself. If you have some spare time I can only recommend checking out his other photographs!

In my next post I will go back to looking at easter eggs and cheat codes and until then, stay tuned!~