Behind The Scenes: Barber Shop Illustration

It's been a while since the last isometric room composition and the list has grown quite a lot from all the comment suggestions. Yes, I have them all somewhere :) I've picked up barber shop idea, because it offered a room for growth and few things I wanted to try out.

I kind of have two room styles I do, and I really love the more stylized cartoony ones (pizzeria, bakery). So the main goal here was to try to use the similar stylized shapes and proportions, while maintaining the dignity and classic feel of the vintage barber scene.

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I've hunted down some nice references of the vintage and modern hipster barber shops to look for the inspiration. The chair was obviously a very important aspect of he scene, so I've looked up several. They kinda look very similar, so I just had to pick one, that could be easily simplified.

All of the shops had few things in common, mostly the classic materials like wood, leather, brick walls and very subtle lighting. What really comes through on all of these images, is focus on classic craft and heritage. This is very important stage, to be able to look through all those different images and soak up the look and feel of these places. 

And I repeatedly saw a chesterfield style sofa in all of the shops so I thought I'll make a small challenge out of it and try to create a quilted leather sofa.

This sketch was a simple one with the proportional goal in mind. I was satisfied with the layout at first, but as you can see I changed it in Blender. It just didn't work for me and it would be a shame to turn that nice quilted leather away from the camera. But in case I didn't like the model, I could use this as is.

I didn't want to overblow the amount of things in the scene so I focus mostly on the mirror area, chair and the sofa. The proportions looked great in the style of recent coffee shop and bakery so I proceeded to modeling.

The next challenge was lighting and colors. All of the other shop illustrations were pretty colorful and bright, but that wouldn't work here. I started with a very restricted palette featuring mostly browns and grays and then played with a background color and lighting. The greenish tint looked great with a vintage tobacco colors of the rest so I just added a red color to chair for some visual interest and contrast. After all, the chair is the hero in the scene.

In the end, I love the result, but there might be a space to try out maybe a bit more playful look so it's closer to the rest of the shops. I just like to keep things consistent.
 

That wraps the insights for the isometric barber shop illustration this week. Thanks for reading and I hope it will help you with some of your projects.

Cheers!