Establishing Style and Colour: Dima Rebus

“The Duke” explores a number of existential themes surrounding the morality and economic fluctuation of the human race due to greed and oppression. By playing as an omnipotent god like figure within the game, the Duke is presented with the fantasy of this wealthy home dimension and the glum reality of the impoverished who must live in misery with no chance of reclamation.

To contrast the ideology of wealth with the hopelessness of malnourished society, our group as decided to take inspiration from Russian artist Dima Rebus and his alluring watercolour works.

Incorporating highly contrasting whites and blacks with accents of warmly faint pinks and colder Prussian blues, the art works produced by Rebus exhibit shockingly realistic compositions of recognizable subject matter, of which when are filtered through the scope of Rebus’s unique attention to lighting and atmosphere detail, creates a sense that there is profound beauty in the aesthetic of depression.

Our group would like to strive to towards making our game not only fun, but also beautiful. We believe that incorporating such an interesting art style into our game world, possibly through the impoverished dimension, can achieve this and more. Seeing as the Meropis dimension intends to capture a sense of despair and sadness in light of economic imbalance, taking from Rebus in this respect will give our art design team a good sense of the aesthetics we desire.