Andréa, Canis Lanonbinary

it's kinda like opposite to the traditional workflow of 2d art but also in the same way - like in 2d, you are working in an inherently unrealistic/illogical medium. lines can go anywhere, paint can fit anywhere. you have nothing given; your job is to create these lines in such a way that the human brain interprets as something approaching reality, not actually reality, but approaching it. on the other hand, when working in 3d, there are certain hard and fast rules and constraints of the program that you have to stretch. it really likes things that have consistent volume and shape - which, good, that part of ur work is done (mind, you still have to create appealing shapes which is fucking hard!!! but at least you don't have to translate them into a bunch of angles) but the issue there is that consistent volume and shape kinda stinks, really. like you know that one meme from the jojo fighting games?

you kind of HAVE to do that to get anything done. and that's most obvious with this sort of human pose, but really, it occurs whenever you want to get ANYTHING done. even the most realistic photoperfect render has to cheat - has to sabotage the 'perfectness' of 3d in more than one way. like this is one of my favorite works of mine:

and there's so much cheating here that's kind of imperceptible. like you see that nice fog in the background? that's actually a gradient projected onto a flat plane, a 0-dimensional object. it just fades from white to transparent and is tactically placed between foreground and background. or, like, see those birds flying away from the superstructure? that's also a plane that i just painted bird silhouettes onto in Krita then placed in the scene. and then there's the obvious ones that everyone probably knows already, that the foreground and background stop immediately outside of frame and there's no actual midground. or there's the way that i tactically distorted the proportions of the model to look right from this exact perspective even tho they'd look like shit from any other angle. and this is a tame example, like. remember that one grungy art piece i made? this one? i could do a fucking talk on the techniques and cheats i had to do to get that to work, both in the shaders and outside of them. (also i reused the bird painting technique 😈)
but that's not really the point.
i think that art mediums are at least partially defined by how you cheat or "lie". cuz really, there's no such thing as "lying" in art, nor even really "cheating", i guess. it's all about the techniques you use to convince the audience that there's more than what there actually is, that the small vignette you are presenting them is representative of, or even a portal to, some sort of wider world or story. I don't really mean that in the cheesy 'oh these characters feel real like i could just climb in to the book!!!!' way but in the more abstract way of tricking your eye, into making things feel real. People think that 3d art is easy or illegitimate or something just because a lot of the difficulty from other, more conventional mediums is abstracted away, but in truth all that does is create other, equally infuriating, equally difficult challenges. when i'm less tired, i'd love to write more about the implications this has on each medium, but for now - just wanna say we should stop dogging on the mediums of other artists! as someone who makes 3d art, writes fiction and also nonfiction articles, does graphic and web design, and tried to do 2d art but failed (cuz bad fine motor skills) each one of these mediums has their own independent, sometimes overlapping, challenges, and that's what makes them interesting. i also think that there should be more multimedia stuff! 3d artists and 2d artists don't often interact, i've noticed, let alone collaborate - but doing so is exactly how you create all sorts of fascinating, genius hybrids. anyway blah this went on too long, sorry for longchosting