Crusader Arts “Red Room” Tribute + 4K Wallpaper

Higher resolution versions at Ello, Imgur, Dribbble, and G+ Photos.

Uncompressed 4K wallpapers are available at G+ Photos.

You can see each step in the creation of this design at the Creative Process Gallery here.

Once upon a week ago, I stumbled across a design named “Red Room” by @crusaderarts, and it charged me with such inspiration that I had to create something. So I did. The first few revisions of this design looked nothing like this; In fact, they almost looked a lot more like one of my previous designs, “Cascading Tiles” - and I would almost have been happy with posting that… but I was having a hard enough time with the -execution- of the design that I was almost willing to give up on some of the creative aspects I wanted, and just post it so I could have something new up before the end of the month.

Then I showed the design to a few friends, and they said that it still needed some work. So I worked at it, and I recreated the piece from scratch with compound matrix transforms rather than with modifiers and face instancing. I spent a lot more time caring about what shapes were actually being tiled, rather than just using some boring, segmented and beveled planes. I payed a lot more attention to each of the specific details which I liked in the source image, and created a reference to each one in my design. Later, a happy accident with the hue slider in post-processing -really- brought the design to life with these wonderfully vibrant purples. All of the extra effort shows in this design, and I couldn’t be happier with it. :)

The lesson I learned this time, is that sometimes it’s a lot faster and easier to start over knowing what mistakes not to repeat, rather than to keep iterating on something which is difficult or inflexible to steer in the direction you -want- to be going.