Concept

The showrooms are each designed to feel like you've entered into an artist's personal studio, with different aesthetics for everything inside them for each medium. Painting is all dark wood and has a fake window for some more light, ceramics is bright and metallic, and drawing is a lot of lighter wood and has a kind of scattered atmosphere.

I focused on the painting showroom for most of the renders and my live demo, though the rest of the showrooms feature similar interactions tailored to their mediums.

In general, I wanted each showroom to be somewhere that you can experiment and play with the different supplies, which for the drawing showroom is what you can do, but I decided that a similar thing for painting would be too messy and expensive, so I developed a set of interactions that still let you learn about the different supplies without getting paint everywhere.

To start, you can look at all the art on the table and once you've found one that you want to learn about the process behind it. Then you place that piece of art on the easel, and a paint splash spreads out from the artwork.

Projected paint spreads around the room, first filling out an empty frame revealing what page to turn to in the sketchbook. The sketchbook features a description from the artist, with a more in-depth information on the decisions they made with their choices of supplies. Almost an artist statement but more focused on the tools than that would typically be.

Then paint continues spreading, next revealing the type of paint, with a brushstroke tying the newly filled frame with the physical bottle that you can pick up to get a closer look. Next, the type of brush is highlighted, making you turn around to explore the rest of the room and the artwork in it. Finally, artwork that was made in a similar way or with similar tools is highlighted with a paint splash around it.

Store Floorplan

I wanted each showroom to feel unique, and part of that was through having them each be different sizes, generally with mediums that take up more space being larger but also with the number of people that theoretically would be going into each showroom also in mind. Checkout is at the back because it's right by the shelves, so as you're walking back out of the shelves you have to pass the checkout area no matter what.

Live Demo

To let people try the primary interaction, placing artwork from the table onto the easel to learn about it, I created a Unity scene and used NFC tags on the back of the pieces of art to trigger the appropriate animations to play.

I built a simple laser cut easel with a spot for my phone to rest in to read the NFC tags, which I placed so that when the artwork is centered on the easel, the tag would be centered on the phone as well. I also built simple boxes for the paint and for the brushes to rest in, so that I would have consistent spacing to animate with.

Artwork

To fill out the renders and live demo with artwork, I decided to paint a collection of pieces in various styles, loosely inspired the pieces I had already picked out for the wall artwork, which I had always intended to be real pieces or artists that you might recognize. None of the inspiration is exact - I wasn't trying to paint in someone else's style - but the idea is that they show how you can use certain techniques and tools in a lot of different ways. Certain pieces were finished almost entirely, others I left more unfinished as if you're stepping into an active studio and not just a gallery, showing the process of painting instead of just the final piece.