“Malleability”: what graphic art? – Mediamixing (3)

 

Third and final post of this series, the present article is intended to put a (far from definitive) point on my reflections on “malleability”, which, in my opinion, constitutes one of the structuring concepts of the “mediagraphic” scientific field I wish to explore. First, and foremost, “malleability” refers to an objective (““Malleability”: a key graphic concept?“): establishing a form of “medium independence” (Steinberg, 2012) in order to create a “media conglomeration” (Steinberg, 2023, p.1) or, more precisely, to enable the circulation of a fiction across several cultural industries. A weekly serial becoming an anime, becoming a manga, becoming multiple dolls, subject to reissues becoming costumes, feature films and all kind of merchandises, Dragon Ball is one of the best examples of this phenomenon.

 

 

The graphic doll

Representation of a character with detailed view of his clothing and equipment

Figure 1. Maronie, “A knight in the medieval castle”, 2023. URL: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/qeRraL (accessed May 24, 2024). © Maronie

 

Secondly, “malleability” is at the very heart of an organization and constitutes the essence of the work of certain actors (“Medium independence and “malleability”): the “character concept artists” mentioned by Olga Kopylova, whose mission is to produce “rough but detailed drawings that need to be polished and completed by someone else” (Kopylova, 2023, p.196). I thus proposed to adopt “blueprint” term proposed by Bryan Hikari Hartzheim in his PhD: referring to a drawing used as the primary material for mass production, as it is designed to facilitate sharing between the multiple contributors in a production chain, the term also invites me to further explore the concept of “malleability”. Or, to be more precise, to attempt to question its third property: what is a “malleable” drawing, or to put it another way, what kind of graphic creation does “malleability” outline?

 

 

Omnipresent illustration? the concept artist portfolio

Presenting a character that could be used in a video game, anime or comic strip development, this image is created by Matthias Zadicoff. In portfolios presented on a concept art platform like Arstation, illustrations are everywhere.

Figure 2. Mathias Zadicoff, “Mia Wallace Quinn”, 2017. URL : https://www.artstation.com/artwork/84Eyn (accessed May 23, 2024). © Mathias Zadicoff

The question arises because we are dealing with productions with a singular purpose: drawings designed “for transformation”, created for others (various collaborators, or even spectators or fans) and intended for mediatic circulation. And this ambition seems to de embodied in a form, absolutely omnipresent within the portfolios of concept artists of all kinds: the “art work”. A few minutes spent exploring a portal like ArtStation are enough to convince you: it’s possible to admire dozens of stunning drawings of multiple characters like Mathias Zadicoff’s Mia Wallace Quinn (cf. figure 2). Intense gaze, forehead forward, and a baseball bat on her shoulders, the graphic creature seems ready for a showdown, but who is she? Here, fiction is very much present (and these pages almost constitute an invitation to invent it); but the narrative, not to mention the text, is noticeably absent.

 

 

The “art work”: illustration “malleability”

Illustration reimagined in other media contexts: the video game Hades is sprinkled with artwork representing the Olympus gods that the hero Zagreus tries to reach while traversing the underworld.

Figure 3. Jen Zee, “Athena”. Artwork realized for Hades, produced by Supergiant Games and released in early access in 2018. URL: https://www.supergiantgames.com/games/hades (accessed May 23, 2024). © Supergiant games and Jen Zee

 

In doing so, we are well beyond the “conventional concept of illustration” studied, for example, by Sonya Petersson in an inspiring paper: “a secondary follower, in the sense that the text is said to determine what the picture juxtaposed to it should represent” (Petersson, 2018, p.351). Much more than a companion to narration, this graphic production seems capable to “answer to questions about their own mediality and capability as illustrations in an actively negotiating, counteractive, response to pre-existing meta-concepts” (Ibid., p.349) such as “image”, “text” and “media”. That’s why it seems more relevant to me to speak of “artwork”: we are dealing with drawings whose producers multiply the modes of appearance, like the Greek gods of the Hades video game (cf. figure 3) who appear and disappear according to their whims and can be found as computer wallpapers, pages of art books, or derivative images produced by other concept artists paying homage to the work of Jen Zee.

 

 

The graphic “walk around”: a character tour

Figure 4. Danilo Athayde, “Realtime Character – based Juhan Na’s Concept Art”, 2015. URL: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/YPO8K (accessed May 23, 2024). © Danilo Athayde

Raising questions about “their own mediality” is in fact the primary property of designs designed according to the principle of “malleability”. Being able to engage an “active negotiation”, or more precisely being available for adaptation, constitutes their raison d’être and concept artists thus seem to refuse anything which constrains a character to a graphic mode of expression and distribution. There is thus another major difference with illustration: “artworks” are rarely constructed solely in the mode of perspective alone, and the third dimension is rarely represented in a purely flat manner. To extract their creation from an overly page-bound space, the concept artist almost always provides the viewer the possibility to literally “walk around” the character (cf. figure 4) by presenting him from the front, in profile, in three quarters or back. The vision of an artwork is sometimes similar to the experience of a sculpture, especially when the character is animated like a statuette placed on a rotating base.

 

“Artwork”: a chromatic panoply

Color palette of a character: it is represented in “wire frame” and in gray level to allow its coloring (presented on the right in the top image) to be applied.

Figure 5. Yumi Batgerel, “The CreedSower – Grand Space Opera: Envoys of The Light Age”, 2021. URL: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/D5ydEG (accessed May 24, 2024). © Yumi Batgerel

 

The graphic pursuit of “malleability” is not limited to support. Besides spaces, inscription involves various drawing techniques and artworks are thus commonly presented in a manner that elucidates their different modes of chromatic composition. This is undoubtedly a real necessity: from paper (or rather various types of papers, glossy or offset depending on the publication mode) to screens (tablet, telephone, television, etc.) and through interactivity (in the form of games using different devices and programming languages), the technologies differ greatly. It is essential to stabilize a palette in order to ensure the graphic consistency of a single character. Seems to me that we are here at the closest to the “blueprint”: the representation in “wireframe” or polygons (see figure 5, at the top) allows for example to computationally structure the coloring by defining areas on which to place layers which can be for example animated.

 

 

The character trousseau

Representation of costumes and various equipment as part of a collective work for an animated series

Figure 6. Ricardo Robles, “Character Concept Art – Sea of Thieves”, 2018. URL: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/Z8V01 (accessed May 24, 2024). © Ricardo Robles

 

Finally, and I will stop at this point, the graphic art of the character concept artist seems to me to present one last characteristic: comprehensiveness. In many portfolios and works available on Artstation (the only platform, admittedly immense, that I have explored so far: more exhaustive study welcome), the creation of a character is rarely limited to the structuring of a silhouette. The work is more akin to the creation of a fiction and readily involves the design of a set of graphic elements serving as a real trousseau for the “graphic doll” that is imagined. On this point, concept art clearly fits the “worldbuilding” enterprise as presented by Stéphane Meury in his research dissertation, “Création de monde chez le concept artist : le modèle de la métaphore générative” (“World creation by the concept artist: the model of generative metaphor”). And the “black box”, the lack of documentation of this singular mode of creation, which Olga Kopylova evokes, takes on considerable proportions.

 

Bibliography

Kopylova, Olga, 2023. “Drawing Works Together: Anime Media Mix and Graphic Style as a Shared Cultural Resource”. Mechademia, Volume 16, Number 1, Winter 2023, pp. 190-211. URL : https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/23/article/910026 (accessed April 10, 2024).

Meury, Stéphane. “Création de monde chez le concept artist : le modèle de la métaphore generative”, mémoire de recherche, Université du Québec à Chicoutimi. URL : https://constellation.uqac.ca/id/eprint/7910/ (accessed May 15, 2024).

Petersson, Sonya, 2018. “The counteractive illustration and its metalanguage”. Word & Image, 34(4), 349–362. https://doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2018.1495382

Steinberg, Marc, 2012. Anime’s Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press.

Steinberg, Marc, 2023. “Introducing the Media Mix”. Mechademia, Volume 16, Number 1, Winter 2023, pp. 1-11.  URL : https://muse.jhu.edu/article/910015 (accessed April 9, 2024).

 

 

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