Valoranian's Life in CMU

Intention

My intention is to create a special fan-art for League of Legends by bringing the characters from the game to real life. This is something that can connect me with other summoners in college, since we are both familiar with League of Legends and our campus. 

Today every successful game will derive a brand new industry, which fan art played a critical role in. Fan art is not constraint to a certain media, ranging from traditional painting and fan fiction, to music production and cosplay. Riot Gaming highly encourage fan art on anything relevant to the game, for there are specific section for fan art on the official website, special forum on reddit and presentation through social network. Doing fan art wouldn't help me make money in the traditional way of selling, but receiving attention, which is important in today's internet dominant world. 

Context

I think my selection of theme share some similarities with Andy Warhol, who often use images of celebrities (e.g Mao), and objects appear in daily life. My audiences are college LOL players, who understand college life and also zealous to this game. 

Process

Each characters in League of Legends has his/her/its unique personal experience, appearance and skills. In the game their life is wonderful and adventurous yet dangerous. differently, which often make me think what would they do if they live in the modern world. Then I began to make a series of pictures which describes the characters' live with some short stories. I encountered some difficulties during the collection of scenes from our campus. Due to the job fairs and other activities this week, some places are closed while some places are overwhelmed by people, which make it hard for me to collect a clean background. Therefore for some pictures I have to borrow the pictures of our campus taken by photographers. 

Product

I first take pictures of our campus, then use photoshop and meitu to blend the characters from league of legends to our campus. The characters mostly comes from fan arts online, which I cut and modified using photoshop.

Critique

I carefully modified the characters and had made a lot effort working on the edges of the characters so that they won't look abrupt when they are combined with the scene in campus. 

The 1st and the last picture uses the original lines from the game to help people understand how the characters' personality is connected with the profession I chose for them.

The 2nd and 3rd picture uses my personal experience. "The answer 42" is a permanent prompt on the CS courses I took. I enjoy having breakfast at skibo cafe but I always receive a sorry for the empty croissant basket.

Personal Reflection

When I first look at "Beg, Borrow&Steal", this idea come out with no hesitation. Although I had made a lot of plans and ideas that can improve the work, I didn't reach my expectation due to time restriction and some accidents during the collection of materials. Since I targeted on the group of college students who are summoners for LOL, people who don't have any experience on LOL may find my work really confusing. If I have more time I would give more explanation and write better stories under each picture.

Professor Viktor from Mechanical Engineering department invented an AI named Blizcrank. Blitzcrank has self-consciousness and astonishing learning ability, which later make it qualified for a formal faculty. 

Professor Blitzcrank is holding office hour and small group discussion for 15-112.

It's 10:00 A.M in the morning in Skibo Cafe and you are told by chef Tahm Kench that there'll be no more croissants for today. 

After officer Caitlyn joined the team of campus police, the calls from students who claim to lock themselves out and need assistance in mid night drastically increased.