PowerPoint City
Digital painting made in PowerPoint with 45k shapes.
technologies used
I have always been fascinated by the dark, grimy cities of the future portrayed in anime, movies and games. However many of today’s movies and media depict rather dark themes like drugs and crime. I wanted to recreate that atmosphere but transform violence to love and friction to unity, with the lives of millions all working together in unison in an immense metropolitan universe. I was inspired to recreate this image in one of my personal favorites for an artistic medium, PowerPoint, but change it to reflect a more positive, romantic image.
Artist's Statement, Hızal Çelik 2015
45,000 Shapes
This artwork is made solely using default shapes, formatting and effects available in Microsoft Office PowerPoint. The shapes are simply ellipses, lines, rectangles and custom freeform polygons. The total number of shapes passed 45,000.
steps
The first step is was to block out the buildings. Then I created the buildings, added lights, and lastly added the "characters" layer on top.
Layered Design
In order for PowerPoint not to crash or lag from the number of drawn shapes, I separated the buildings into layers. Each layer was saved as a PNG and was placed in a new, fresh slide.
By using this layered image method, instead of animating the thousands of shapes, the final slide only contained five images (the layers).
Vehicles
The artwork contains many vehicles flying around in the background. Although the "farthest" looking air-traffic patterns are only comprised of colored faded circles of light, the "closer" vehicles are actually fully rendered and based off of actual vehicle designs, including a Porsche, the Delorean, and my own car.