Behind the Scenes: Living Room Illustration

I wanted to ground myself in reality for a bit and try something new. Not a fantasy or sci-fi stuff, nor anything nostalgic or thematic. I just wanted to build a room I would enjoy. So the theme of the week was - how would my dream living room look?

Fortunately, I had some Pinterest boards to look at, since we're trying to figure out our future home with my wife. Sometimes, when you need to find a new inspiration, the easiest thing to do is look at your immediate surroundings and projects you're dealing with outside of your work.

So I have an idea and also a mood board? Job done.

Nope, it definitely didn't mean I had everything figured out, it was only a place to start and potentially pivot from. But since I already had a style ready, I could focus more on the details.?

Thing with interiors is, that the moment you take it seriously, even the simplest thing as a lamp choice, can freeze you in place and send you looking for hours for the right piece. Of course, you need to know when enough is enough, but the fact I didn't have to start from scratch, gave me some bonus time to deal with those details.

I saved the images with the details I liked to a PureRef board, and cropped them into smaller frames focusing on those parts. You can see the example above. Table setup, clock, lamps. Isolating and grouping them together like this can give you a nice bird's eye perspective on the work you're trying to create.

I never leave out the good old paper sketch. Even with all of these details figured out, I still didn't know how to put them together. Sketching will provide you with a breathing room and space for exploring your thoughts at a minimum time cost.

Just erase and try again. It will take you maybe half an hour to get a very rough (no need to refine, I'm doing that only for the newsletter and to work on my lines) sketch as opposed to several hours of Blender modeling and landing on something you don't like.

After few attempts, I had a quite balanced layout with all the details from the reference board accounted for and I was ready for some 3d.

You can watch the?process video on Youtube?

So that's it for the latest illustration and I hope it will help you with your own projects.

See you in the next one! :)