Behind The Scenes: Christmas Hearth

This one is again pretty straightforward. I wanted to do the final (almost;) ) Xmas illustration and if I look back at my portfolio, it's only appropriate to create a cozy room with a tree, decorations and subtle lighting.

Even if an idea like that pops into your head, it would look easy to jump right into Blender and start working only to be left staring at the default cube without an idea where to begin. How large is the room going to be? Is it going to be rustic, modern? What about windows and furniture?

So many questions to answer and that's where the proper preparation and research comes into place. Enter Pinterest sorcery and endless (and I mean endless) results after typing "Christmas living room" into the search bar.

Visit the full Pinboard here

Pinterest can show you a lot of results and it's easy to slip into a mismatch of ideas so it's important to keep focus and look for smaller amount of images in the beginning simply to define the style you're looking for. 

After that, you can easily expand on those searches or explore related images to find details you like the most. I've ended up collecting images of mostly rustic and cabin-like interiors with stone fireplace and lot of wooden materials.

Also, in terms of colors, I wanted more restricted palette so I avoided traditional and a bit cheesy things like red and green decoration, socks and candy canes.

I really loved one particular image with large stone wall with fireplace built into it, so I wanted to create the rest of the room around that idea. These isometric sketches take a bit more time to refine the lines and proportions, but that's the reason they can be really important. You are forced to define all the details of the room and when you're finished, you can see where you miss something.

I wanted to give the fireplace so much room, it was obvious this is going to be a small scale scene so I left out the ideas with sofas and living room furniture and kept it focused around hearth, tree and a simple armchair. So it became basically just a corner of some larger room. That reduced the number of demands on the details and kept the modeling phase more simple.

Also, I cheated a little bit and used gifts from my previous commentary quick tip, so if you're interested to see, how to make those, you can watch it right here.

There are lot of practical shortcuts I used to make this quick, so have a look below to see some of those :)

So that's it for this year's Christmas illustration and I really hope it can help you to make your illustrations more effectively and to your liking.

See you in the next one! :)