Robbie Trevino analysis

 

Last night I listened to the first part of a Robbie Trevino webinar from schoolism.com and took some notes on some of his thoughts on design and wanted to share them here while also making sure to ingrain them further into my own thought process.

The first thing that he mentions is that  when we do something surreal there always has to be a human element to the work otherwise it will become too abstract and not relatable. The key things we are looking at in his work are the following: Architecture Sentience, Scale, Relatability and Suggesting a narrative. 

Architecture Sentience

This idea is closely related to a term he coined "Flesh Tech" which was inspired from living in Detroit all his life. He would see old cars laying in the junk yard and imagine them as dead carcasses. This lended itself and is obvious in his designs. His designs usually have imagined pieces of architecture that have a flesh tone to them but also fleshy components to them. Here we see this in the giant thing the characters are standing on, in the crevices of this giant monolith like structure is a flesh like substance that seems to be moving around inside the structure. 

We could also extend this to include the two turret like figures although they are not architecture, they also don't seem like they would be able to move from where they are at. 

Scale

Scale obviously plays a big role here and we see this with large shapes posed next to even larger shapes. We are given the impression that this takes place way up in the sky as the structure they are on is obviously huge but not as big as the clouds that surround the object. One imagines a giant monolith being attacked or attacking another structure with these figures providing defense.

Relatability

Robbie says we always need a relatable human element to our designs otherwise the drama and story of a particular design is lost. Here we can see relatability being expressed in a lot of ways. The use of flesh on the architecture itself makes it "feel" like it could be sentient. As well as the human faces on the turrets and the human torso and intestines of the figure with the machine gun as a head.

Narrative

In my mind this looks like a sentient structure floating through the sky either being attacked or attacking another structure.

Big medium and small 

Here I broke down the shapes of big (RED) medium (BLUE) and small (GREEN) and tried to think about how he organized each of these elements. Obviously there is a lot more elements of small shapes throughout the piece but I only focused on the major ones. 

How these affect composition is very important. One could say that your eye enters in around the clouds and is lead around the central figure by the bullets swaying out from beside him. They wrap around and enter into the gun head where we get to see the awesome detain of the body which is our main focal point. 

Throughout the rest of the piece we see big shapes holding medium shapes and those medium shapes are holding smaller shapes each one a subdivision of the previous. But the key is where he puts those small shapes is often where we want our audience to look. 

Rest vs Detail

The arrangement of a composition should always be considered an arrangement of shapes we want the eye to linger on and others that give the eye rest to move through the space easily. So in other words detail vs space, and how do we know we want to add detail? Well we think about where we want our audience to look. 

Not every single part of this piece is fully rendered, there are spots that have very little detail such as the legs of the figure in front, while other areas have tons of detail such as the barrel of the gun on his head, his intestines, the bullets leading into the head and the bullet holes on his arm. This creates a natural balance throughout the design because since we add so much detail up top we shouldn't add it to his legs. If we did it would be distracting and would be overwhelming. 

Likewise the entire structure itself has way more detail that the puffy floaty clouds in the background, there is a natural contrast here that is very visually appealing to look at.