Change of plans
Big changes
On one beautiful summer day, I joined others for another group critique session with happy thoughts about the 2D designs I had just completed for my second character in the series, Ukko. I had planned to ask for feedback and preference regarding his outfit before moving on to modelling, but little did I know how much would change.
Big changes at this stage terrify me. They absolutely horrify me, since it means redoing, rethinking and possible delays in the already jam-packed schedule. But as I was presenting my work Sharon raised concerns about the amount of characters I had compared to the small amount of time we had until the deadline. She suggested that I should axe the other characters entirely and only focus on Vetehinen and instead of creating a series of other gods I would have several paintings of Vetehinen as well as the 3D sculpture.
I’ve been in this situation before, only last year we were constantly asked about our decision to include five characters for our undergrad film, but we stood firmly on our ground, refusing to budge and change our artistic vision. And in the end, it paid off. So of course my first stance was to oppose. I was fearful of the final result and how limited my exhibition would be with just one character instead of four and how lacking would the diversity be. I had planned on this set for almost a year now and had a clear image in my head of how it would look. I had scheduled my entire summer and was confident I could pull it off. I still do. But a small seed of doubt was growing and I started to second guess myself, can I really pull it off? Am I sacrificing quality over quantity?
So instead of completely brushing this idea aside, I decided to give it a chance and see if I could build the exhibition with just one character and still be proud of it. This of course meant some serious rethinking of the three 3D paintings and how I could represent them. Vetehinen’s story is not that exciting, we can state that right away and understand that there’s no way that will result in interesting pieces to present. If I wanted to simplify it, I would have three paintings; first showing her drowning (the first person to drown in a body of water), second showing her being lonely and angry (for being the only one living underwater as others were happy on the land) and third expressing how she began to drown people to bring them with her below the surface.
This is all straightforward and nice, but I can’t help but see this as a graphic novel instead of fine art. I’m struggling to find the reason why any of these would work as an individual art piece like my original plan. With different characters, I would at least have very distinct different art pieces to show. I’m also not loving the idea of seeing the same exact character in each frame, to me it feels very boring.
But I can’t help but to agree that if I decide to continue down the road I was on my way already, I would be very limited with time and stress would be my constant companion until the very end. I didn’t take into my calculations the revisions of the character designs, as I had just planned on making them, and then moving directly to modelling. In a sense, I was a little cocky thinking they would be approvable from the get-go.
So, let’s try. Let’s try to make this one mermaid show work and see if I can come up with something as exciting as I had originally planned.
The new set
Since I had to revamp my series of digital photos for the Master’s show (been calling it the Degree Show by accident), I had to come up with new ideas for the “paintings”. Since I still was feeling rebellious about the whole idea and couldn’t see any point in this, I rather skipped the idea of trying to come up with any design right away but rather went back to romanticism and tried to find paintings that would match my theme – water, beaches, nature. There are some amazing online print shops for old paintings I found, for example, Repro Arte and Global Gallery. Even though their main thing is to sell fine art prints they also double as an archive for hundreds of romantic paintings and their related info.
Below are some examples I found:
I also went ahead and searched for paintings from outside of Romanticism, as none of the paintings I could find were pictured underwater. Quite understandably the painters of the time weren’t really able to venture under the surface to make observations so all of the paintings seemed to only marvel at the sight from above. One exception was the Ophelia drowning, which is from the late 1800s but is still pictured underwater.
Even though these paintings are from the “wrong era”, I still needed to find out how painters saw the underwater scenes and how they applied the textures and colours accordingly.
First ideas popping into mind
As I was googling and studying these paintings I finally found the small spark again – hey, this could work! I was starting to see new possibilities mixing elements from the paintings and adding my character into them, moulding the end result to my liking. I could tell her story in a very majestic and romantic way, each piece looking like a real painting. This obviously posed another issue, if I wanted to go full-on romanticism I would give more space to nature and less to the character – is the main focus then on the character anymore? Will she be lost in the huge scene and more importantly, is it really less work ditching other characters if it means I’ll have even more to model in terms of the background?
Sean had mentioned earlier the possibility of using image planes for further away details, so this is one solution that could possibly save time. I could also play with lighting and focus to make sure that Vetehinen would always be the focal point of the piece. This would require some serious planning.
So let’s look at the story and the myth again:
An ancient belief held that there were water gods in the water, who were controlled or manifested by a water lord Ahti. Water gods could be angered by breaking taboos related to fishing. It was believed that the first person to drown in a body of water became an evil water god Vetehinen, who would then attempt to lure the living to drown. It could rise to the surface of the land and draw its inhabitants to the water. In these respects, Vetehinen resembles a Näkki (a type of demonic jinn that appears as a floating tree trunk, a large black horse, a hound, a silvery fish, a beautiful woman with three breasts, or an unsightly fisherman) and may be the native predecessor of the non-näkki character in Finland.
According to a folk tale, Vetehinen harassed fishermen on the lake. It followed the boat for a long time and finally caught hold of its side. At this point, the men on the boat used an axe to cut off the pulling hand. Vetehinen promised to leave the people alone if it could get its hand back. That happened, and since then Vetehinen has not come out of the depths to bother people. (Alhonen, 2020)
A more in-depth look can be found in the previous post here.
I want to focus on the origin story instead of the disappearing story, so to simplify it as I did earlier (with more excitement this time), I could have three paintings portraying three moments in her life: drowning and transforming, loneliness and longing and lastly anger and attacking. The sculpture would then be a portrait of her current state, before the final encounter, inviting people to see the exhibition in more detail. Her pose should be playful and inviting, but as decided way before, showing the darkness below the surface.
After showing these sketches to the staff and classmates, it was suggested that I could book a life model for myself to study more of the dynamic poses. Since this was something I was clearly struggling with, I was more than happy to comply! I sent an email to Christine McLachlan asking if this could be arranged and even asked if I was allowed to take photos as this would prove most helpful. Luckily there was a model who was fine with this, and we agreed to meet on 14th of June.
At first we were supposed to take the photos at the photo studio, but unfortunately the booking wasn’t successful and when we arrived there was already someone else using the space. Going outside didn’t sound like the best idea considering the blasting heat that was coming down from the sky, so we went ahead and got settled in the life drawing room in Crawfold. The model was super helpful with brainstorming poses with me thinking of movies and pictures that came into mind and then we got to work. She was content on adding the photos to online blog, mentioning that it would be even better if her name would be left out of it. So that’s what I did. Below are some of the shots we were able to achieve (there was over 400 in total).
"Drowning"
"Loneliness"
"Anger"
"Playful" (sculpture)
Also some hand close ups for reference
We were ready in about an hour, any more than that would’ve been too painful as the temperature of that room was absolutely boiling. Even that in mind the poses came out super nice! We were able to dig out some raw emotion especially on the anger part, so I was very impressed. Especially the actual screaming anger portrait became one of my absolute favourites. As a photographer who shoots cutesy weddings, pets and children 99% of the time I rarely get a chance to work with a theatrical model like this.
Back at home I dumbed everything in Lightroom, binned the duplicates and missed ones and narrowed down the “top” to be little over 160 in total. I then did some quick sketches from the images.
Based on these plans and observations I moved onto the actual digital pieces, as well as the 3D printed sculpture.