Notes on Joon Ahn from a recent brainstorm webinar

 

Recently Joon Ahn did a webinar where he talks about his process of creating images that have strong visual impact and I wanted to take some notes of that here and see what I could find in this piece that applies. Soon I'll be looking at some more pieces of his and breaking it down further but this is what I recall and how it applies. 

Big medium and small can help you define your perspective better

This one is pretty clear here we have a giant sword as a shape that is repeated throughout the piece that helps give it harmony and variety but it also helps you define your perspective better. He talks about how he will often drop his horizon line into a piece and then from there he will create a circle in perspective and let that be his standard by which he can measure all the rest of the shapes to. 

Here it might not be a circle but it could be in the form of the giant sword in the image since this is a giant rectangle held slightly in perspective it helps to be our standard of distance between different shapes. This is also clear in the fact that we get a clearer indication of the space and the size of everything by the figure standing next to it. This indicates our scale and gives us an idea of how far away the swords in the distance are and how big the giant head in the background is. 

Break the image down into 3 or 4 values only at first

Another tip he had was to categorize everything into separate values in a flat design to where it is overlapping with one another without the light information. This would mean that he grouped, at first, the figure next to the sword into the same shadow group as the background and it was only after he had organized the main 3 or 4 values into different groupings that he then went in and subdivided these individually with their own value forms. 

If we analyze the values we can see that the values stay in a similar grey tone on the figure, backdrop and shadows of the head but get darker in the mid-ground which helps create some atmospheric perspective.