Art Reimagined: The Emergence Of VR And Crypto Art
We aren’t all just about software development here at Neblio Dev Central, as we have talented and visionary people from all areas of the tech and creative industries, promoting their work and collaborating on game changing projects. Lately our community members have been super impressed by some of the incredible VR and crypto artwork that is making it’s way on to the web and social media sites. We are amazed by all the cool mind bending art made in VR and we want to see more of it, but also want to get to know the people creating it. The most popular platform for VR artists is an application made by Google, called Tilt Brush.
What Is Tilt Brush?
Tilt Brush is a VR painting application which provides a canvas for artists, to create incredible masterpieces in three dimensional space. A normal 2D painting program such as MS paint for example, only allows the artist/user to draw and paint on a flat 2D canvas. VR art is a whole other level of different. Imagine being able to step inside a canvas which is literally all around you and you are able to paint in all 360 degrees of freedom and being able to then see your brush strokes from literally any angle from any point in the 3D plane, well, that is what you will experience when painting in VR.
With that said however, it’s not always easy to convey or present to the onlooker outside of VR, to fully comprehend or appreciate what the experience is actually like, if they have never used a Virtual Reality device before. In order to give people an idea, mixed reality footage shot with cameras and a green screen does give the audience a better idea of what it is actually like inside of a VR game or application. More on mixed reality video in a future article but in the meantime, check this out by VR content creator Anaburn when you have a moment.
Let us get back to the main topic of this post and focus on VR art created in Tilt Brush. As you can see from the video, artists have full freedom to create art in a fully three dimensional virtual canvas and the results (If you have great art skills of course, this author most definitely does not!) can be absolutely stunning.
Who is creating art in VR?
When it comes to art, people begin to think about all the talented and famous artists that have created amazing, emotive, beautiful, bizarre and abstract works over the years. From Van Gogh to Warhol, Picasso, Dali, Monet, Munch and many others. They were undoubtedly masters of the brush, all using different styles to convey something and express themselves, but all still painting on a flat 2D canvas. Fast forward to now and a new generation of artists are taking to the stage and mastering the digital brush and creating works of art that are capturing the imagination and blowing minds of observers around the world. So who are the master artists of the VR art world? We are going to try and shine a light on one of them, here in this article.
We have come across many talented artists such as Rosie Summers, Spaced Painter, Peter Simcoe, Karen Vanderpool and many others. We wanted to feature one artist in particular and give you a little bit of background information about who they are and what brought them to the VR art scene. Introducing Dongsuk Lee, more commonly known as Suk, from the Korean Republic. Suk as an artist started out painting mostly nature scenes, but not overly set on what style she actually used but converging into VR art, began to adopt a more abstract, expressionist type of style. Suk explains what changed when she made the jump into VR.
“I had never thought about which art style my work would belong to. When I was painting on paper with ink and light colors, I mainly drew everyday life and nature. I tried to express my work like this in a virtual reality space. However, unlike plane work, work in space seems to lead me in an expressionist direction.
Basically, my work was heavily influenced by Korean art during the Joseon Dynasty. When I first did VR Art, I was very impressed by VR Human’s work, which expresses emotion well.”
Above is an example of Suk’s traditional non VR artwork, which is quite beautifully done in it’s own right. Let’s take a look at an example of Suk’s VR art created in Tilt Brush.
As you can see in this piece of VR art, Suk is letting her imagination and creative juices run free and is expressing herself in a more expressive and creative way. That’s perhaps due to having so much more freedom to create, being able to paint all around herself as opposed to being confined to a flat 2D plane, she is able to paint using the available space, with each brush stroke being viewable from absolutely any angle, seems to allow for visualizing a scene differently. We asked Suk what is the appeal creating art in VR to which she replied:
“VR is a work outside the two-dimensional plane. So I was curious and thought I could create more diverse stories.”
“I like to enjoy the beauty in the virtual space I created. It is also my pleasure to share this with many people. I have been working a lot in the meantime, and it was nice to have people who like my work as well as my skill in handling the Tilt Brush. I like to express what happens in my daily life or nature. While working in a virtual space, I became interested in the use of space and installation works. It is also interesting to introduce places that people have not experienced before or to provide a place to look back at memories.”
VR Art Challenge
Suk is currently undertaking a quite incredible challenge and that is to create a piece of VR artwork every day for a whole year! Suk explained what the idea behind this challenge was.
“I am doing a Year-of-vr-art-challenge with VR ART Live members. They give me a theme and I work on it. I am doing it to increase my capabilities. It is not easy to work with the theme. Because I want to incorporate my artistic sense as well.”
As you can see, the above piece is from day 185 and you can literally go through Suk’s Twitter feed and check out every piece of art that was posted daily, yes daily since day 1 to this very day. We have picked out a few to present here, (We would love to have featured every single one but #impractical) Do take a moment, grab a cup of coffee and a snack and take a magical trip through the feed. Suk has created spectacular and unique VR art pieces under various different themes which run through a block of days, from magical trees, silhouettes, technology, mystical landscapes and many others.
The abstract and expressionist nature of some of these works come through amazingly well in VR and shows what can be done when out of the confines of a flat canvas. The feeling of painting or floating in air or space as Suk describes, is something you can only get, while painting and creating in this particular medium.
“It was amazing to be with the work in one space. It was a movement to a new space that the brush was drawn and floating in the air.”
Crypto Art
Due to the growing popularity of blockchain based NFT, (Non Fungible Tokens) artists are now using them to store data and sell their artwork on a marketplace. Some works amazingly can sell for a substantial amount of money. For example this NFT art auction made the artist over $3.5m in sales. Not all NFT art will sell for that kind of money, as most will sell for much less. If you are not a big name, selling for more modest sums in the tens or hundreds of dollars, possibly thousands is a more realistic sale price.
The potential growth of the NFT art scene, could well open the doors to many more artists and so it is always possible for new talent to sneak in and make a name for themselves. VR artists are also starting to sell their work in this way, creating an NFT to represent a particular piece of VR art and listing it on a marketplace which is open to members of the public, who can view and make purchases using crypto currencies. Spaced Painter is one such VR crypto artist who is doing exactly that.
if you have any specific questions you would like to ask. We also now have a dedicated Tilt Brush and VR art channel as well, so we’d love to see you artists in our amazing community, sharing your work and talking about your experiences.
Stay tuned for more on Crypto art, mixed and virtual reality and lots more content in the coming weeks and months. Wishing all our community members and readers a very happy new year from everyone at Dev Central!
