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tokyo life
Isabel Fang
Yale-NUS College, Singapore
Fine Art - Illustration
capturing the hyperreal tokyo life through neon
東京ライフ・TOKYO LIFE
tokyo is an enigma. it is a city that is simultaneously so technologically futuristic and artistically innovative, but still bound to austere traditions and conservative values. it represents the epitome of contradiction. it is a city that truly comes alive in the darkness, when the streets are washed in lights and colour. it is easy to become overwhelmed, but once you embrace tokyo and all the crazy adventures it has to offer, it becomes the greatest city in the world.
so here i present a short series of paintings attempting to capture fragments of tokyo.
through neon, or rather, neon-noir, i sought to represent the electric, exuberant, hyperreality of the tokyo life.
some details:
process:
for the scenescape paintings I first edited the colours/perspectives photo using lightroom, then moved to photoshop to experiment with filtering over certain sections (poster edge, watercolours effects, blurring, lens flare, etc.), draw over areas to create add clouds, buildings, 'clean up' background people buy blurring or painting over faces, and in general create a more painterly effect. from there, I would continue using photoshop to paint people in the scene.
the idea to create scenes this way arose during my solo adventures, when I would want to capture a scene not just as a landscape or something, but with people interacting in it. I took many candid photos of strangers, but always lacked a model that I could style and pose. So instead I thought, if I can't photograph it, I'll draw it.
digital paintings always started with the figures. specifically the eyes. the rest of the face/body would develop from the eyes, followed by the foreground, background, and then other effects (overlayed highlights, sparks, textures), and finally finishing touches through adjustments (curves, saturation, etc.) and blur filters.