Perception of ‘Doors’
Illustrator Olga Gurova Opens Up On The Inspiration Behind Her Most Recent #ConceptDo piece

When ConceptD approached me to be next in the long-line of creatives to have made a #ConceptDo D-doodle, I immediately began to search for inspiration.

Usually, photography and movies with incredible cinematography inspire me. I also find a bunch of inspiration watching another artist’s’ process’: how they work with composition and colors, which materials they use, when they decide their work is finished, and so on.

I had been given the ConceptD 3 Ezel to work with, which has this Ezel Hinge mechanism, letting the display open and close, and fix into different positions. A quote immediately came to mind when seeing this feature — “When one door closes, another opens” — and it is this quote, and the free associations which come with it, which became the main inspiration behind my project.

As I mentioned, I’m always watching movies for ideas, and so I thought an animation would be the ideal form to express the theme of the quote with. To be honest, animation is something new for me. This is in keeping with my style as a whole — it tends to change from project to project, but

I think this is a positive thing to help broaden my artistic pallet, and this #ConceptDo piece can be seen as another experiment of form.

This being said, the actual style of the piece fits quite well with everything I do nowadays — all my works tend to be minimalistic and a little bit cartoony. Also, I find drawing characters extremely joyful, and my portfolio is very character-centric, so it was not too much of a departure — I may be keen to experiment, but I still think it is important to create what comes naturally.

Even though the final ConceptDo animation is only 21 seconds long, it took quite some time to draw all the opening doors for the frame-by-frame animations. It took me a lot of time to get the raster details right in Photoshop, before switching to Adobe AfterEffects to put all those pieces together and add some extra textures.

The most challenging thing was to draw those doors hundreds of times to create the frame-by- frame animation in Photoshop. I could have used less frames to do that, but I loved how smooth and slowly they opened. Also, finding the brushes to make the textures took some time, but it was paramount to create the right atmosphere in the piece.

I hope my #ConceptDo piece ‘Doors’ will be a reminder that there is no such thing in life as a ‘dead end’. “When one door closes, another opens”. These words always help me to move forward, and I hope they can have the same effect on whoever sees the piece.