Nenad Gojkovic Biography
Serbia, born 1988
I was born in Serbia, the capitol Belgrade, where I live to this day, at the age of 34. I'm a senior hard-surface concept artist by profession, specialized in weapon, env. prop, vehicle and architecture design for the entertainment industry. I have over 10 years of experience in it, worked on a number of AAA games, COD:Infinite Warfare, Metro Exodus, Borderlands, Atomic Heart, recently released, to name some. Haven't worked on a film yet but I guess worth mentioning is that I was approached by James Cameron's studio, the LightStorm Entertainment in 2017. They were considering me for the design of vehicles in these Avatar sequels but unfortunately (or maybe fortunately), due to various reasons, I wasn't able to work on the franchise. I worked on my own IP (2D video game) instead and in retrospect, I'm glad I did.
| Statement |
I am an emerging pessimistic digital artist who does AI/Stable Diffusion assisted antinatalism themed art. AI assisted, not AI created, there's a big difference. There's not much quality art explicitly inspired by this and related philosophies, there's quite a void and I'm very excited to fill it, as much as I can, with as unique as thought-provoking paintings as possible.
For a while I had this desire to do more traditional art, in addition to what I'm already doing, professionally and otherwise. I enjoy renaissance paintings a lot. I wished to do paintings like that. Now, being captured by pessimism, and with the appearance of these AI txt to img tools, there is the opportunity to do what I wanted. New themes barely explored and new technique of art creation, which makes it very exciting.
Regarding the process of creation, the first step of course is to come up with an idea and this can take a while. Then you create a more polished sketch out of that initial scribble and sometimes as you do it, new ideas complementary to the core one come to mind. The next step is rendering lots of images in Stable Diffusion, of all the stuff that will be needed to make the painting. This prompting of individual parts or building this library of parts can take a while. The more renders per part the better, as you eventually end up with multiple proper angles, shapes and what not, to choose from.
Even some shadows and highlights are originating from the renders, placed with the clone tool (Photoshop). You want to use the clone too as much as possible, and do hand-drawing only where it is necessary. For one, you want to keep that canvas texture on all the shades.
The next step is choosing which image to start the painting with, which one to use as the base. It's a scary moment, as this base image will kind of guide the rest of the process so, if you rush it and choose badly, you may need to start over again. After careful consideration, you pick one. Down the process, parts are taken from some of the collected renders (usually placed around the base image in Photoshop), carefully put together, each is then corrected or further perfected, with the clone tool or by hand. As the visual quality (lighting, its direction, painterly look etc. ) is nearly the same in all the renders, after all the work is done, you have an image that is quite coherent visually.
The exact process or technique is novel and the first piece was a proof of concept essentially. The question now is, is anything possible given enough time and effort? It may be too early to say though with the 3rd piece out, the answer seems more or less positive. I have conceptualized around 10 pieces, 3 have been realized so far.
I do antinatalism/efilism (extension or more extreme version of the prior) inspired art. These are very controversial pessimistic philosophies which I see as golden mines in terms of the themes they provide for more original works of art, of all kinds, novels, games, movies, what have you. I noticed that I like doing things that basically no one has done before. It really makes me excited, this pioneering. So, what makes these so attractive to me is their obscurity, yet they pose very interesting and important questions about life, worthy of consideration.
