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Behind the Scenes: French Street Illustration
🕑 Added 2024-10-12 08:25:22 +0000 UTC
Sometimes, your next personal project can be simple. Simple in terms of the theme, simple in terms of what you're trying to do on both artistic and technical level. Just a canvas to be painted.
If you always strive for the next big thing and maximize your effort in your expression and technical skills, the exhaustion can crawl up to you. The legendary "creative burnout".
In gaming, there is this term, called "min-maxing" and it's basically trying to get the best possible optimized results even at the cost of suppressing the role-playing element of the game or overall immersion and enjoyment.
What if you just created something for the sake of creating something? For the pure joy of the process. Making it simple, lightweight and using the techniques you know and can repeat in your sleep. Taking a minute and bask in the light of creative confidence you worked so hard to gain.
Visit the full Pinboard here
I think, taking this sort of "break", put it in neutral and just enjoy the process listening to podcast or music can really re-charge your creative appetite and help build energy towards that next big thing.
This is exactly how I felt when deciding what do to here. I really like some of my recent perspective dioramas with stylized environment and materials and freestyle outline. I used those techniques a hundred times and made probably over a hundred vehicle models. So the only mental challenge was to decide, what car and street I will do next. I did Italy, Croatia, so why not France? The legendary Citroen 2CV is so photogenic.
I looked up some references and saved some french street images. I really loved some of the arched gates and windows in combination with wooden brasserie facades so I went ahead and started a sketch.
Here, I mostly wanted to find a balance between the architectural elements and try to place some details, that would round up the composition.
For example, the narrow and tall streetlamp is balancing the wide and low vehicle on the other side, while the arched windows on the second floor give the rest of the scene comfort of repetition and rythm. Finally, break the clean layout by sprinkling in some plant overgrowth here and there and I was ready for Blender.
But I noticed, that unintentionally, I had a red vehicle and blue brasserie facade in my reference board. Well, let's use those, make the rest of the environment bright and pale, and there are your French flag colors.
You just gotta love happy accidents :)
You can watch the full process video on Youtube.
