DIGA STUDIO ARTIST RESPONSE WORKS
Wrap The Time
Based on a prompt of the same name Wrap the Time is an exploration video game. Designed in Unity using mostly pre-made asset packs, the game is a litmus test on the player's own psyche and priorities. Confronted with a small world of sober and wonderful features alike, the player is released with no goals, no tutorial, and not even any company. All that the viewer gets upon opening the game is a camera with five shots of film on it and a world to explore.
The images created by the player's camera are saved to their hard drive. You can take a stroll through the end of the world and have a few memories to remember it by. Time is limited, too. Walk around a bit. See what the world has to offer. The movement of the sun and the counter of photos left in the camera's memory are entirely player-driven, but they're still limited. Time won't move on without you, but it will still move. What will you do with it?
Jewel of the Empire
We are living on the cusp of history, with unprecedented material, technological, and intellectual advancement in the last few decades, but our ethics aren’t developing as quickly as our technology. The Jewel of the Empire is a videogame where participants walk around in an apocalyptic city devoid of life. The different districts of the city (designed by Rose Johnson using premade assets) each contain music (provided by Joseph Campbell) that emotionally resonates with the specific kinds of injustice or recklessness that led to the city’s downfall. The project is a critique of urbanization and reckless insufficiently interrogated technological advancement. Taking cues from Frankenstein and the story of Atlantis, the environment and sound of the project was designed in
Unity as a sobering reminder that we need to care about each other in a functional society. Otherwise, everything will fall apart and all that will be left is the empty streets and the lingering memories of how it all was allowed to go so wrong.
Ready For Her Closeup
I need to tell you about Walnut. When given a prompt relating to the relationship between idealized dreams and true reality, I also stumbled upon the story of a humble Crane named Walnut. Walnut is a relatively normal white-nape crane (an endangered species!) but there are two things that make Walnut special among Cranes. She's married to a human, and she's also a homicidal maniac!
As near as her caretakers can tell, Walnut's strange behavior is a result of her being born and raised in the 90s, before Zookeepers were particularly worried about or even aware of "imprinting", where a baby animal raised exclusively by humans, especially without special regulations in place, will grow up thinking that IT is a human! Walnut thinks that she is a beautiful human woman, and whenever they try to pair her up with male cranes, she allegedly kills them (This bird is caught up in murder intrigue and everything!)
Upon finding out about this fabulous lady, I HAD to make an illustration of her showing off her fabulous feathers, and she's reversed with the equally fabulous Norma Desmond (as by Gloria Swanson) because it just captures the ENERGY so well!!
"And Horns"
This piece is about body image, and a little bit about race, and it was a rough one to work on. Based off of another illustration by my good friend Andy Ramirez, it shows a demon boy, looking at himself in the bathroom mirror, and he's not happy with what he sees.
I think, in the setting of the piece, demons and angels aren't morally unanimous groups like they tend to be in a lot of media. I wanted to explore the idea of having parts of your identity moralized or judged for aspects you can't control. This young man has to go out every day and hear that "demons are ugly, demons are mean, demons are loud and rude and inconsiderate" both from people of other groups and from fellow demons who I'm sure have learned to lean into it and embrace that part of their identity, even despite receiving external judgement. Moralized expectations based on body type or race are ROUGH, and aren't examined nearly enough, as ubitquitous as the trope is in our culture.
The base 3D model was modelled, sculpted, and posed in Blender, and additional drawing and details were added in Clip Studio Paint, my go-to illustration program. I'm sure this poor boy wants nothing more than to look in the window and see a beautiful angel. He shouldn't HAVE to think of himself as being in a whole other demographic to be desirable, but that's the world he
lives in. And he doesn't get wings or a halo or pretty pale skin. Instead, he has a tail. And Horns.