Behind the Scenes: North Pole Illustration

Let the festivities begin! 
Towards the end of the year, I just love the let myself go with the flow and succumb to all the snowy, blinking and glittering goodness of Christmas time. Turn off the brain and let it fill with all the red and green kitch this holiday has to offer.

And I always like to create at least one outdoor environment and also some indoor scene (coming right up ;). It's a refreshing thing, not to ponder about themes and inspiration. It's a well deserved rest for all the creators, dishing out new designs throughout the year. Just sitting down and creating the "cheesy" stuff.

Visit the full Pinboard here

I wanted to do a nice snowy outdoor scene, so I went and explored some of my earlier designs first. It can help me to round up all the styles and techniques I already did on this topic and build up on that by either evolving some of the designs, or on the other hand making sure I try something new.

I really liked one my earlier textured house designs (the on the left in the references snapshot), so I picked it as a starting point and searched for some Xmas references. I came across several "Santa Workshop" ideas and I felt it would be a nice thing to do. Giving the textured house diorama a little bit of that Xmas fairy tale.

As always, I like to put my thoughts in a sketch first. I probably wouldn't even know where to start and just stared at Blender's default cube, if I didn't do this. First I pick a rough building layout and try to fit it within the scene bounds. Basically trying to come up with the house proportions, different parts of it, roofs, porch and stuff like that.

This part is always very rough, with a lot of back and forth sketching, erasing and reorganizing the composition, until the scaffolding looks pleasing. Then I just refine it over and over, adding small details and objects until it all plays together well.

There's always one or two central ideas, that make up the essence of the piece. In this case, it was the outdoor workshop area, with the pillars and workbench. I got this idea from one of the references and basically built the layout around it while sketching.

Otherwise, this would be just another Xmas docerated house, but when you find that one focus point to build around, you get yourself something interesting to make.

You can watch the process video on Youtube.