Recent CGI Magic

Next week I will be attending the 8th International CGI Congress in Hamburg, Germany, held on June 1 and 2. In addition to the program with loads for speakers on the development on all things CGI (check out  https://www.icgiw.com/program-speaker-2016/), Lürzer's Archive in cooperation with the ICGIW will be handing out the first International CGI Award. Since this year will also see the publication of our next biennial issue of 200 Best Digital Artists we decided to make submissions to this award automatically eligible for our book (and vice versa). 

That means by Monday I'll have to present the jury of the ICGIW awards with a selection of the CGI work that has come in during past months. So I went through the submissions and chose work that will also be presented to our very own jury for the book published by Lürzer's Archive later this year. As always there was lots of digitally dolled-up car and landscape photography where the ends to the digital means were just to idealise (which frequently lead to rather "fake-looking" results I'm afraid). What we really aim to showcase are the “fantasy worlds”, in which the borders between photography, model-making and illustration get blurred.

Interestingly, I found a lot of submissions by CGI artists who had tried to get their work into our 200 Best Illustrators special which should be available in the next few weeks – but which we tried to keep free of overly digitally composed work. It's clear that nowadays the many, if not most, illustrators work digitally but there is still a noticeable difference between the CGI fireworks by digital artists and illustrators creating their work entirely (or partly) on computers. 

Another thing that struck me was that while the fantastical tableaux that made up a lot of the GCI work featured the issues of 200 Best Digital Artists in the past are still there, in other words digital creations that could never be achieved through the medium of photography, there is also somewhat of a trend to make the finished image look like another medium altogether, perhaps collage, or graphic design, sometimes with typography added to make the images appear like posters from past decades. These artists use the digital medium to make the finished work look analogue. This is a trend I have also noticed in advertising where a kind of "self-made" look with a certain degree of quasi-authenticity seems to be in favour with quite a lot of clients and creatives these days.

Anyway, have a look at the examples that I have picked out for you and I'm going to tell you next week what the winner turned out to be. The International CGI Award also means of course that we will be featuring it for free in our 200 Best Digital Artists.

Digital work by US artist Haris Fazlani.

 From a campaign for Asics brand sport shoes. Digital artists: Saddington Baynes, London.