Behind The Scenes: North Pole Illustrations

As the year comes closer to its end and Christmas is just days or hours away, I'm always looking to make my creative work part of my relaxation. I don't like to push mysleft too much in December. For me, it's always about taking things slower, taking some time to retrospect and enjoy quiet and silent moments.

And also, I like getting festive :) My wife taught me that, I never was a much of a X-mas guy back in the days. So I've decided to go easy on the production part of my work this week, and heavy on the Christmas theme :)

There are many ways how to approach Christmas theme, especially with the global reach of social media. You can go more religious way, or just adopt the good 'ol American Santa stuff. Well, I decided to go for the latter :)

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I thought I'll be easy to fill my Pinterest board with all sorts of Santa illustrations, but it was harder than I thought. When the theme is so broad and ubiquitous, it's more difficult to get the illustrative results you're looking for in the sea of X-mas decoration ideas.

So you need to go deeper, refine your search words and click through some similarities to gather enought results you're looking for. After a while, I had a nice selection of ideas and decided to focus on North Pole theme. 

So the common denominators were small and cute cottages, lots of snow and of course - white and red spirals. Can't get enough of those!

In terms of style, I decided to add to my small stylized game asset buildings, mostly to keep the process simple and less time consuming. The scale and level of details is less demanding, there are no textures or UV mapping and it's a very relaxing process to make one.

That doesn't mean I didn't need the sketch. On the contrary, to keep the process enjoyable, I always need to know what I'm modeling. Additionally, it's a nice way how to ease into the process. You can watch a movie while doodling around and get into the mood.

After sketching some building proportions, I refined it according to some reference images, using the spiral pillars as the key detail on the hut. After including the snowy tree, there was still some detail missing and I remembered one particular North Pole sign design from Christmas Lego set. There are lots of places to go for inspiration.

The rest was just quiet and enjoyable modeling session while listening to some festive tunes and sipping a spicy tea.

You can watch the process video on Youtube

So that's it for the latest illustration and I want to wish you all very Merry Christmas, or whatever it is that you do to celebrate towards the end of the year, regardless of your origin, or religion. Important thing is, to get some rest, enjoy our friends and families and recharge our body and mind, to be ready for yet another productive and creative year.