Behind the Scenes: Winter Town Illustration

Each year, I tend to create seasonal and festive content towards the end of the year. At some point this might get repetitive and old. So how do you celebrate and still get excited to create?

Well, there's always variations. Have you done a Christmas tree before? What about placing it differently? Or maybe giving it a pop-culture theme? There are always ways to create 10 new ideas out of one.

Then there's another way. Simplify. Distill down. With the festive content, there's always many ways how we celebrate. Different cultures, different religions. But there's always a way how to make it accessible to wider range of people. Because when it comes to end-of-the-year celebrations, almost everybody understands winter. I say almost, because even then, there are parts of the world with a very warm Xmas :)

But, it definitely hits a wider spectrum of audience and you get a chance to resonate with more people, no matter their cultural background. Unless you're very religious and it's important for you to present this time of the year your way. Which is absolutely fine as long as you enjoy it.

Visit the full Pinboard here

This is why I picked the general winter theme this year and when doing research and searching for references, I avoided festive decorations. I only wanted to see cozy winter locations and environments.

And as always, I was searching for a wide variety of ideas, not necessarily planning to use all of them. There's always a later stage in my process, where I hand-pick the stuff I want to include and mix and match different details to come up with something I like.

After creating a broader Pinterest board, I then import some of those into the PureRef and move them around, scale them based on importance and crop out details, so I don't get overwhelmed by all the imagery.

Before jumping into Blender, it's absolutely essential for me to do a sketch. Sometimes it's very rough, sometimes I enjoy the process and do some detailing. Whatever it is you do, remember that it doesn't really matter, as long as helps you to test out variations, placements and different angles of what you want to create.

By the way, there are some who prefer to do this in 3D right away. Just put some boxes in place and move them around to test different ideas. Again, whatever works for you is fine as long as it helps you to move in methodical way.

Just don't do the mistake of diving in right away with for example a single building down to the last brick and detail, only to find out later, that you wanted completely different style of roof or different stylization. 

Work in layers, build rough shapes and layouts first, then do a round of detailing, then another and so on...

You can watch the full process video on Youtube. 

See you ion the next one :)