Behind The Scenes: Arcane House

I always get a lot of questions, where my ideas come from. It's quite easy. The essential thing is to observe and consume other content and create bucket lists of what you like and want to tackle. After that, it's always about picking the theme you feel like doing.

This time, I really wanted to create a very stylized, almost cartoonish house with exaggerated proportions and surreal architecture. There are lot of those out there, but most of the time they're either painted, or use very stylized textures.

I've decided to combine the model stylization with semi-realistic texturing, since I really like Substance materials in Blender (There is amazing new addon from Adobe). This way, even though I'm inspired to do something I have already seen, I'm giving it a new twist. If you add a bit of personal workflow and your own eyes (these are different for everyone, guaranteed), you have yourself and original work.

Visit the full Pinboard here

But to not get ahead of myself, that was still very rough idea and I needed some quality reference, so as always, Pinterest to the rescue. I've search for a lot of cartoon house, stylized houses and fantasy towers, until I found few images that approximately matched what I had in mind.

Out of nowhere, there was this amazing drawing (the first on the left above) of a stylized building. I loved everything about it. Colors, glowing elements and bit of otherworldly aesthetics and writings. It reminded me of DnD style fantasy themes and word "arcane" immediately popped into my head. 

I decided, that I'll change my goal a bit and instead of creating a generic cartoon house, this will be "arcane house" in the first place and all of the other things I mentioned will serve as secondary inspiration.

Sometimes, when you have a central theme in mind, it's great to focus and stay in lane and throw away intruding ideas. But when your concept is very vague, don't shy away from flipping the script and change your focus in the middle of the research.

Ah, you piece of empty sketchbook page. We meet again. Sketching process can be more daunting, when working with broad concepts like "I'm gonna create a shiny crooked house". There is no other way around it. You do a first line and you're prepared to erase everything and start over. It's a good thing, trust me. Imagine staring at default cube with such a vague concept in mind.

I've sketched out few cubes to lay out how the parts of the house will be organized. I always referenced my board for the types of roofs and stuff like that. For some reason I even included second set of stairs only to find out, I probably just saw them on that "arcane" house concept. That's how brain works. You see something and later you just use it unintentionally (useful and dangerous at the same time). In the detailing phase, I included some elements and motives, like the moon crest, runes and ornamental window. 

And there you have it. Started with cartoon house in mind and ended up with Arcane House illustration. This is where my ideas come from :)

You can watch the process video on Youtube