Behind The Scenes: Training Grounds

Earlier this year, I've tried to do a quick and easy stylized building illustration, something you would see in a strategy game like Civilization. I quite enjoyed the process and style, so I mad few more. Some went well, the others not so much.

It's a learning process and if you want to create a coherent series, you definitely need a trial and error phase. But there were two of them that stood out, so I thought I'll try to finalize the stylistic and lighting approach with a new one.

So far I made Blacksmith, Tavern, Lumber Yard and Farm. I only like the first two (I guess I'll go and rework the others) so I studied them a bit (you can see the Tavern down below on the left) and came up with a set of rules I need to follow to match the look and feel.

Visit the full Pinboard here

The first step was to decide on the next building. I just went and searched for strategy game buildings to get some comprehensive overview of possible ways to go. I really like the barracks style of building, something military. So I went ahead and gathered few references.

I always create a Pinboard for my projects to accumulate all the possible material I could need. Sometimes, these are building shape references or mood and lighting shots. But I save some just for the purpose of bookmarking details. For example here, I saved the one image just because it had a military tent, and I wanted to remember to use that detail later.

The next step is always some sketching and I get a lot of questions about this. So I'll repeat this few more times so everyone can catch it - you REALLY don't need to be skillful at drawing. Not at all. It's all about marking your ideas and shifting them around to see, how the final composition might look like and whether it even works.

The question here was, can I fit all the ideas I saved on one composition? This was the problem with the Lumber Yard one. I loved the ideas of separate house and mill, but the resulting scale was off, and the result didn't fit with the rest of the series.

So I made sure, I will push these separate details together more on this one. I basically joined the tower and the house and placed the tent really close, while making sure I leave enough empty space around. The rest was about placing these other details like swords, targets and flag. There was still something missing, so I added a rope lift on the side of the tower to break the symmetry.

You can watch the process video on Youtube