Shadow-obsessed and very good with a color picker, 3D artist Crtomir Just has a new personal series called Imposiball.
Five short loops, five sports, and in every one of them something about the light is quietly lying to you.
Every scene is shot from the same isometric camera, the high, angled view you know from old strategy games and architectural axonometrics. It flattens a court into a tidy diagram. Then Just fills the diagram with flat slabs of color (clay orange, pool-tile blue, a mint green that no golf course has ever been) and hard noon shadows. Nothing is cluttered. There is one ball, one net, one paddle. Which makes it all the stranger when the shadow under that one object starts doing its own thing.
We first featured Just in January for Face Off, his portrait series with Matej Koncan that melted human faces into fields of pink and green. Imposiball is the opposite mood. Crisp, playful, almost toy-like. Same restless interest in what an image is hiding, though.
Table tennis: the paddle that forgot its shadow
Start here, because it is the one that breaks your brain fastest. A paddle lies on a blue table. Its shadow lies a few inches away. The ball drops, bounces, and the paddle flips from red rubber to black. The shadow doesn’t flinch. Neither does the little shadow of the ball, which seems to be keeping a completely different appointment.
Basketball: a hoop on a gray afternoon
Primary blue and school-bus yellow, a curved white post and a backboard catching the sun. The court is drawn like a floor plan. Watch the shadows on it rather than the ball. Sixteen seconds, and you’ll want to see it twice.
Tennis: life on the tape
Anyone who has played knows the agony of a ball clipping the top of the net and hanging there for half a second. Just stretches that half second into a whole film. The clay is the exact burnt orange of Roland Garros, and the ball is that optic yellow that, fun fact, we partly owe to David Attenborough.
Golf: two balls, one cup
The shortest of the five at nine seconds, and maybe the funniest. A speckled green that looks more like a terrazzo kitchen counter than a putting surface, two balls, a hole. Count the shadows before you hit play!
Swimming: stairs into a very small sea
Our favorite of the set. A rounded pool is cut straight into a flat pink plane, with pink stairs stepping down into impossibly blue water and a striped beach ball waiting on the top step. It reads like a Ricardo Bofill daydream shrunk to the size of a soap dish. Just titled the file “Bazen,” which is the Slovenian (and Croatian) word for pool, a small human fingerprint on a very clean render.
Why it works
Our eyes trust shadows more than almost anything else in a picture. A shadow tells us where an object sits, how high it floats and where the sun is. Painters and illusionists have exploited that for centuries (we rounded up some of the best in our surreal art collection), and Just does it with the calm of a sports broadcast. Because everything else is so simple and so legible, the one wrong shadow lands like a missed call by the referee. You notice it instantly. You just can’t believe it.
If flat planes and bold color are your thing, you might also like how Joshua Vides turned cars and an entire gallery into one flat sketch, another trick played on depth. See more of Crtomir Just’s work on Behance and follow along on Instagram.
Images and animations © Copyright Crtomir Just. Via Inspiration Grid.
