Isometric Dioramas

Something I wrote in early ’21, I thought it was worth digging this post up as it more or less set the direction of how I have been seeing the visual style panning out after the PostIt Note project; this concept has been the one thing that had unrelentingly stuck with me as I worked through everything else.

Isometric dioramas…

The PostIt doodles I’d been doing for the last months of ’20 enforced an idea of ‘constraint’ –  their diminutive size forced a focus on story and composition in the simplest manner; which produced some very interesting outcomes.

The concept behind the quasi isometric format (quasi as I am using perspective rather than being true isometric) is similar – each base, or volume, is a concentrated moment, a point in time where just the slice of most interest is extracted; it’s very reminiscent of a model dioramas – something I have always loved. I had thought about this format for many years, but shelved it because @thisnorthernboy sort of ended up owning it with his most very excellent isometric buildings… I hope he doesn’t mind my adopting the format!

 
2020: Fooling around with z-Brush seeing how an isometric could pan out in 3D

2022 Note: Since writing the above, I have discovered the work of Owen Pomery, a commercial illustrator out of the UK, who also does a lot of isometric illustrations. I’d be lying if I said I was not a fan of his work and this naturally raises all sorts of questions within myself – with several artists I know using the isometric as a style, should I be doing the same thing, would it been as ‘copying’ and all that sort of guff? As it was put to me “…Rob and Owen are on the scene, sure, but not in the same way.” And the truth lies in that statement. Any creative endeavour is clouded by those who have, or are doing, similar things, it can’t be helped. But it’s what you bring to it that makes it yours, so you should not let those that came before, or exist in parallel, stop you from chasing your own ideas or interpretation.