Ash Thorp is one of those artists out there who is an absolute beast when it comes to creative output. Having followed him and his work for a few years, I was excited when he launched a learning course on Learn Squared called “UI and Data Design for Film”, that I immediately bought it and got to work*.
Here in this blog post, I present a collection of work that I put together from the lessons in the course. If you haven’t heard of Ash Thorp, and are unaware of his working methods, he teaches an approach to create asset libraries that you can use to combine and build upon to create new visuals.
First, he teaches the mindset behind it, and encourages you to make sketches in your sketchbook, and then to digitize them in illustrator. From there you play around and create more ideas and make little combinations, and continue to build up a wealth of a visual library you can play with.
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| A photo of my sketchbook where I made little sketches of motifs I had seen out in the world and in the reference I had collected for the course. |
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| My digitised asset library, using my sketches as inspiration. |
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| Four concept pieces using my asset library to build. |
This process was something I already employed in my day to day work, and for me is possibly the most fun part of the creative journey. I could easily spend days just making little motifs and assets with no real end in sight.
With this mindset and way of working, in the course, you jump into Cinema 4D and pretty much do the same thing but this time using simple shapes and applying various arrays and other modifiers. I didn’t have a lot of experience with 3D at the time, so this was a slow learning process for me.
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| A small selection of the assets I rendered out from Cinema 4D |
Once you have more exports, you take them into Photoshop, and you bring it all together based on the idea from the brief, mixing in elements created earlier on in Illustrator.
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| First concept of combining the Cinema 4D assets together. |
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| My final design using assets from both the Cinema 4D and Illustrator asset libraries I had created. |
I fully recommend the course to designers looking to try a new approach to their work, and also to pick up new techniques in a software they’ve not tried their hand at before.
Lloyd Harvey
*well, this isn’t entirely true, I bought it and started working on it like, a year or two later.
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