Assignment 5: Imagining the Future

Brief

Choose a current social (like inequality or migration), cultural (identity, heritage, or representation), or technological (AI, climate change, or urban development) issue that you find compelling. 

Imagine how this issue might evolve 50 or 100 years into the future. Create a landscape illustration that represents this imagined future environment where the impacts of this issue are fully realised. Your illustration should explore how culture, identity, and technology might shape the physical spaces of tomorrow.  

You might find the following questions of use in thinking about this project:

• How will the evolution of this issue influence physical environments?

• What role will cultural identity and diversity play in shaping future spaces?

• How might technological advancements or societal shifts redefine how people interact with their surroundings?

Your finished illustration can be hand-drawn or digitally created, and it can be in black and white or colour. Remember to include any relevant sketches, thumbnails and reference material on your learning log.

Initial Idea

For this assignment, I want to use climate change as the issues to base my landscape illustration on, I'm torn on whether to do an landscape illustration on if we end up tackling it or not. However looking up stats, regardless of phasing out coal power and using more renewable energy 1 we are still not likely to fix climate change anytime soon. 2

I think I'll use charcoal, I recently experimented with it and I think it would fit the devastation that is climate change, I may experiment before-hand with other mediums.

Mood Board

Reflecting on the landscape

I imagine the future (50 years) to be a very dry and hot place if we don't fix climate change, with ever-growing technological advancements with AI, I can imagine corporations taking advantage of this and lay off A LOT of staff -- leaving people without jobs and more likely homeless, corporations will plaster even more advertisements everywhere you go, consumerism will only increase even more so than now. There would be lack of wild-life, drying trees, fires, weather events high sea levels.

Ideas/ Experimentation

So, I have recently dabbled in some experimentation, I used charcoal and produced the piece below, it was extremely fun to do which got me really excited to use it for this assignment. However, I recently got gifted a concept art book 'The Art of Arcane' which had lots of beautiful artwork (and more to the point) it had incredible matte landscape painting. It got me thinking, maybe I should attempt to create in digital.

This illustration is meant to show the effects of climate change in the future, and I feel like charcoal would be good story-telling wise since it's lost the vibrant green world and it could be this dusty, dry earth. On the other hand, there would be so many benefits to using colour, there is a lot of story-telling in colour, I could capture the blue lights of electricity and the vibrant reds of fires, or the orange hue to the sun blaming down on the dry earth.

Because of this, I am going to attempt digital, and if it's still doesn't meet the standards I will use my new medium charcoal to create the landscape.

Research

I wanted to make sure I can expand my knowledge of using digital painting to the best of my ability to create story and atmosphere, I want viewers to see the painting as a stark reality of what our future could be.

When it comes to painting digitally, it was important that the first step is to have a loose line drawing; it can be detailed but it depends on how much structure you want in the painting. In my instance I might want to include technology and different structures to the illustration so I have to balance that when it comes to it.

Through to the next stage is the values, similar to traditional paintings, the values are important to convey light and shapes. The values itself should balance one another, and typically our eyes are drawn to light, so I want to keep my subject in the light-- or at least guide our eyes.

With values, you can use gradient maps to create colour more quickly, something most digital artists use when painting landscapes; the grayscale values that were done previously will become coloured and is quite quick when it comes to churning out concepts.

After the gradient colour, comes the hand-painted colour and textures; when doing this it's important to trust the process and focus on the element you're trying to push like story or colour. Be careful during this stage since you can throw off the synergy of the painting by adding too much "noise", you can lose focus so keep it simple for the flow. 3

Movie Stills References

I want to use these movie stills as references to my landscape painting.

Thumbnails/Sketches

Colour Thumbnails

Process

To summarise the long video, I did a two sketches and ended up sticking with the original one, then I used a monochromatic colour palette to get in my tones and shadows to perfect my lighting. Then I used a gradient map to get in my local colours then painted on top of that to create oppositional colours to make certain areas slightly pop. I realised that there wasn't anything to indicate climate change so I added the effects of climate change that we see today which is wildfires, using different brushes to create smoke effects.

I played around with what to add to the fires, using since the light of the fires draw your attention. Then ended up adding the buildings. I also added people to give the landscape a bit of life, in turn adding some little detail of laundry being hung to dry.

For smoke and fires effects I played around with different brushes and effects, using motion blur in the direction of the wind to really add to the atmosphere.

Final work

Evaluation

For this assignment, I had to create an illustration of a landscape that projected what the future would be like with the goal of a certain topic in mind whether it was cultural, social or technological. I decided to go with climate change, so I wanted to have focus on the weather-- in this case the fires, that rage because of climate change. This is 50 years into the future (and mor recent times), however it probably has not enough technological/environmental advances to display what the future would be like.

I tried my best with that by including hologram advertisements, drone deliveries and towers for signals and stuff on the roof of each building. I imagine that more flats would be built because of the growing populations, and lack of space.

When it came to creating this piece, I really tried to focus on shape and colour to convey the story. Something that I tried this time was using the greyscale to create the lighting for the piece which helped a lot, thankfully my research helped me come across this tip and it ended up enhancing this piece; the mood of the piece does convey a morbid reality if we don't act now to fight climate change.

I'm happy with how this turned out, so I didn't resort to using charcoal to create the piece.

1 U/A, Green Peace 'What is the UK doing about climate change?', U/A. https://www.greenpeace.org.uk/challenges/climate-change/what-is-the-uk-doing-about-climate-change/ Accessed Apr 22, 2025.

2 S Safdie, Greenly 'Climate Change in 2025: Where Do We Stand?', Sept 2, 2024. https://greenly.earth/en-gb/blog/ecology-news/climate-change-in-2022-where-do-we-stand Accessed Apr 22, 2025.

3 Grady Frederick Art, YouTube 'Secret Ruins - Digital Painting Process and Commentary', Apr 8, 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNJpz_7EcEE Accessed Apr 27, 2025.