Charactir
Art archive

3D · Rainbow (now Prism)

A tree bearing lightbulbs instead of fruit. A wealth of ideas, on a hot pink ground.

A small round tree modelled from hundreds of overlapping green paper leaves, growing out of a black elliptical hole in a flat crimson ground. A dozen warm white lightbulbs hang among the leaves, lit, casting a green glow through the foliage around them.

The tree bears lightbulbs as fruit, signifying a wealth of ideas.

The last of the three rendered illustrations for Rainbow, later Prism. The metaphor is the oldest one in advertising and it survives here on execution: the bulbs are not stuck onto the tree, they are hanging where fruit would hang, at fruit scale, in fruit quantity.

The canopy is built from individual leaves rather than a textured sphere, which is what lets the bulbs sit inside it and glow through. It is the only light in the picture that behaves like real light rather than like cut paper. Everything else is the same construction as the other two: flat saturated ground, matte model, and a hole where a shadow would be.