I started by looking at modern day Singapore,

Singapore is covered in lights and it feels almost futuristic in its design. The lights have many colours, most of them leaning towards warmer shades. I decided to use lanterns to mimic that, all of my lanterns are a single colour and they are placed only on the central building to make it the focal point.

The city has laws in place that demand buildings over a certain size have a predetermined number of plants and greenery. When you look at some of Singapore's most iconic buildings you can see the influence. At first I intended to have my building overgrown with ivy but due to time and how expensive ivy is to render I settled for a small column of ivy on one of the corners.

It has an iconic fountain/sculpture in the shape of a lion with a fish tail, it's even made into sweets you can buy there. There are also a lot of fish in Singapore art and mythology since it was originally a fishing settlement. For these reasons I decided to make a sculpture inspired by the fountain on top of the gallery. I also incorporated the fish in as a wind catcher, (one of the things that fly in the direction of the wind mostly found in airports nowadays) it hangs there with the lanterns.

There are large amounts of water in Singapore. There are even canals that go through malls and markets, these canals are large enough to have a ferryman there taking people through the mall. It was quite obvious to me that my work needed water, so I decided to place my gallery next to a canal.

Peranakan culture has a big influence on Singapore and is one of the more prevalent cultures there. There are entire streets built with their architectural style. Its bright, its colourful and its ornamental for my project I took mainly inspiration from the colours and windows.

The oldest houses I could find were kampung and Malay houses that have been around for about 150 years but it's my oldest source so I took them as my main inspiration.

It was hard to find any information on historical Singapore.

There isn't any information about that time period in Singapore and the closest date I could find was 4 years after my date when Singapore got colonised by the british. All the information was also about big events in history but none of them really mentioned architecture.

Because of that I looked at the architecture of other places that have either colonised it, blended with it or are mistaken as a place Singapore is part of.

Britain colonised Singapore in 1819-1942. Japan occupied Singapore in 1942-1945. Singapore merged with Malaysia 1963 – 1965.

When I was doing my research I found out that a lot of people think that Singapore is part of China, my theory is that it's because one of the most prevalent languages there is Mandarin as well as part of the population being originally from China.

So I took inspiration from buildings around that time period from all of the mentioned countries.

What is an art gallery and how to recognise it from the outside? That is an impossible question to answer really because every gallery is so different that the only thing connecting them is that they probably have the words gallery written somewhere on them. Most galleries started as a private collection and those that didn't usually have an interesting architecture that isn't common in that area.

A lot of galleries have banners with their names written there. The most well known gallery in Singapore has a big glowing banner in the front. Some galleries palace a sculpture outside, usually big enough that no one would try to steal it.

I took that as the main inspiration and placed 3 banners on the building as well as placing the fish lion sculpture on the roof to help with making it look like a gallery. I also made the building brighter and with more colours than any of the surrounding buildings.

For my art references I looked at animated movies and shows that had more of a hand painted/drawn look.

I choose arcane as one of the main inspirations for the style since I love its painterly textures. Arcane has this amazing style of animation which is not easy to replicate. In this project I used it to inspire my textures.

Spider-verser was chosen for its amazing use of colours and stylization. I love how each of the universes have a different style and for this project I especially loved the vibrancy of spiderman india and his world. That was the main inspiration for the baseline colours.

Spirited away as well as all the other ghibli movies has an amazing way of conveying atmosphere. I tried to get inspired by it to make my render feel as if the world was just calming down after a long day at sunset.

As for The Mitchells vs. the Machines I didn't really end up taking much from them but I wanted to keep the movie in the inspirations since it was one of the first movies I thought of initially.