Origins

Three factors led me to the practice generally, if clumsily, known as 'rendering'. One was an increasing interest in visual art. The second was my constant desire, retained since early childhood, to emulate anyone and anything I admire. And the third, hinted at by the title of this blog, was my intrinsic inability to paint or draw. And I mean that. Bottom of the class at art in school and never likely to go anywhere else. An unsteadiness of hand or some imbalance between left and right spheres of the brain or – or whatever. I will never be able to write like Margaret Atwood either, but I can at least knock together a halfway competent novel. And whilst being tone deaf, I could hitch a wagon to the music train briefly by learning the drums. The art thing, though, seemed insoluble.

Of course, in the era of Young – or nowadays, not so Young – British Artists, this shouldn't have mattered too much. Perhaps Damien Hurst or Tracy Emin can't sketch anything more sophisticated than a sun with a smiley face either, and this has never slowed them down. However, these were never the people who inspired me. I have never wanted to pickle sharks or fill houses with concrete, except for laughs. I was always drawn to the serious realists. Caravaggio, Manet, Rembrandt, Hopper, with their pitiless, often cruel depictions of alienation, pride and suffering. Put a mirror to the world, never mind whether or not it enjoys the experience. There was just the small drawback that I couldn't build the mirror.

So, as tends to be my response to any problem nowadays, I turned to computers and the internet. For some time I was aware of three dimensional modelling programs, where the software does most of the serious work and you are left free to tinker around. Or, to put it slightly more charitably, you provide the inspiration and your computer the perspiration. The brand leader is called, rather aptly, Poser. It costs a hilarious amount of money. I was trying to work out how to justify a purchase to my bank balance and soul when I stumbled across a cut-price version called Daz Studio. So cut-price, in fact, that the basic software is free.

This is of course a cunning marketing ploy rather than an act of benevolence by Daz. You end up buying so many add-ons and appliances to get that software to do anything whatsoever that the eventual spend is itself fairly hilarious. But you can't the stuff with you, I suppose. And now I can claim to have one more string on my creative bow. I can study a Brueghel and plan how to rip him off. I can pretend to be an artist.

'Artist and Easel Circa 2007'

A fun one to create. Just a shame I didn't spend as much time on lighting and background as I did on the props. The juvenile clutter was inspired by my brother-in-law's computer room; he even has a framed map of Middle Earth on his walls. This and other details mark a start of a serious messing about with textures. The Sonic Youth poster was modified from a pirate map model; the Wallace & Grommit mouse map built from scratch. The image on the computer was a screen dump taken from Daz Studio, using the god-awful fairy models you get free with the software. It was supposed to be a parody of the many, many fairy images which clutter up sites like Renderosity. Though most of those artists, unlike myself at this stage, know how to use lighting effectively.

'Hoopoos Spotted At Blackmarsh Reserve'

This is another early one I quite like. It was inspired by those birdwatching fanatics, my mum and dad. And of course, dad promptly informed me that real bird hides would never have a shelf on the outside. I reminded him what 'artistic license' meant. He didn't pick up on the fact that to get the look right, the man's binoculars were actually protruding several inches into his head. The shadows on the hide were quite a sucessful experiment, putting a bush model out of shot but just in front of the lighting.

'Meantime'

My first halfway-decent image. I still rather like it, though the lighting's very crude. The grafitti was pinched from a photo on the web, except the York City Football Club bit, but I literally put the wall together brick by brick. I had an image of a single brick on my graphics program. So I had to copy that, paste it next to another, paste it again and again... A truly fun hour or so.

A friend claimed the blond girl's breasts are rather large compared to her body mass. I don't see it myself; and anyway, my main problem with that girl was getting her skirt to cover some of her dignity. An oddity of Daz Studio skirts is that they can't handle sitting postures. If you move the hemline in line with the thighs, chances are that the whole thing will be twisted practically off the body. As it is, too much of the poor girl's buttocks are showing; but it's the best I could do.

The postures copy Edward Hopper's old trick of ensuring figures are never facing towards each other. The title, meanwhile, is lifted from a Mike Leigh film. It's the first of several 'Disaffected Youth' pictures which are part social commentary, part wish fulfilment. I was never a disaffected youth myself. I wasn't always that happy, but was always too shy to sit on street curbs shouting at people.

The First One

'The Conversation.' The first proper rendering image I did via Daz Studio. The word 'crude' barely does it justice. I had to turn the camera down in the street scene about 45 degrees to disguise the fact that I had absolutely no buildings to put behind the woman. And turn her arm at 90 degrees to her body to get her hand anywhere near her head. Also, try to not look too closely at the brickwork on the right.

It's a split screen thing, in case that isn't obvious. Two images done seperately and then welded together. The slightly obvious meaning is a bright, happy mother chattering over the mobile to her gloomy daughter, who isn't listening. The theme is alienation, of course, but I think we can say it's been done better elsewhere. It was, if nothing else, good practice.