Tearing down the Surface of Earth

The Climate crisis is a commonplace issue, or even a common human knowledge, but based on the general understanding of this topic, I unconsciously fell into a misunderstanding and overlooked the significance of thinking in the opposite direction. Perhaps influenced by the impression that many artworks use a pessimistic future as a warning to people, I have always considered how to depict a depressing future affected by climate change, while completely ignoring the other possibility - that idealized good things can also lead to reflection and thought. I realized the limitations of my thinking when I stumbled upon Zongbo Jiang's work Shared Planet. Despite that my outlook is completely different from his, I was inspired by his work: an enviable future can also be a wake-up call or a thought-provoking reminder of the reality in front of us, inspiring us to make changes. In the end, however, due to the limited time available to complete the work and the fact that I had done a tone of in-depth research on the existing idea, I chose to continue the original one.

My whole process, from research visualization through rough sketches—went quite smoothly, but I ran into a problem when it came time to the final work.
The biggest problem I encountered was how to maintain a sense of harmony and unity while keeping the image impactful. Due to the nature of Monopoly-style compositions, the intricate information elements and the relatively even distribution made the image look a bit too busy and disorganized. Additionally, with my personal preference for highly saturated colors, the work initially confused me. I adjusted the space between the central pattern and the surrounding patterns to achieve relative visual comfort. I also modified all the object to a monochromatic color palette of mainly blue, but in the end I found it easy to mislead the viewer into believing that the disaster I was trying to convey was only related to the sea. After various experiments, I ultimately chose to replace a lot of the motifs with linear hand-painting in white to maintain a sense of unity, and replaced the background with a dark blue cosmic starry sky to suggest a plan to demolish the Earth initiated by a cosmic government.

To conclude my review, as a result of this work's incompleteness(not yet a real game in its final stage), I am personally not particularly satisfied with the final effect of this work. But in many respects, the experience is novel for me. In terms of the project’s theme, my previous work has always been closely linked to my personal experiences, but this time it was a much larger and broader theme for all of life and the environment. Secondly, I used collage for the first time in the process to visualize my research, and in the final illustration I also innovated in a way that I hadn't done before, by trying to incorporate a lot of hand-drawn and collage elements into my original electronic painting style, which has inspired a new direction for my illustration research that I think I can explore in more depth in the future.