Introduction
Christmas is one of the most popular holidays across the world, with lots of images based on fantasy characters, like Santa Claus, his reindeers, or families having amazing moments, but… what about the snowmen? The snowmen have a family too? If yes, can they celebrate Christmas? Well, these were my questions for my concepts. A little weird, yes, but it can work!
We’ll see the first part of the process, the concept creation, references, blocking, and the first details.
Final illustration
Investigation & moodboard
Like other projects, before starting with any concept, we need to introduce a lot of information to our mind about the topic to interest us. Often we don’t research text information, only images, but text can help us too understand what the background of the tradition is.
In my case I researched images and a little information about snowmen, Christmas villages, decorations, and people playing.
The moodboard can have many sort of photos, even different illustrations, as a result of the aim of it’s reference.
Blocking
Making a blocking is the best option to begin any challenge, since you begin to challenge the concepts that exist solely in your thoughts. A blocking usually does not must take time, the essential factor on this step is to know the aim of the composition and the primary parts, which can usually be represented by primary shapes, and they’ll changed later for different detailed props.
It’s important to be happy with the result of the blocking, it’s true, maybe it can’t look like our final illustration, but it works as a starting point.
Adding details at the blocking
With the first approach ready, it’s time to add some extra details to polish our composition by adding a purpose to our objects, like the floor, searching dynamism, or the house searching the traditional village houses. It’s important to advance since the general things until the polish and detailed things. Don’t forget the purpose of adding details is to help the storytelling and add environmental context.
Adding details is one of the most stressful things when we don’t know what to add, but going back to your moodboard can help.
Polishing
Basically polish will be our task in all the illustration process, but in the first steps it is fundamental, because it will give us the base, without a good base we can’t continue creating.
This polishing can be moving some objects a little, or more elaborate changes, like the floor case. For the floor, our natural lines were confusing and guided us out of our composition. On the new floor I needed do to this lines to work as guides towards the main object, the Christmas tree.
Once we’re making our blocking you will need to consider our pure guides and the path of our picture, the remainder of our belongings might be supported by these guides.
Essential props
To create the primary props we are able to make little sketches of them nevertheless it isn’t mandatory, the primary attribute for these props must be extra detailed than one other secondary prop, which may normally take us extra time, nevertheless it’s essential to have a very good visible hierarchy.
The extent of particulars all the time is a option to stand out any prop or character, however the dimension, an uncommon form, and brilliant colours can work too.
Don’t overlook to seek for extra inspirational photos, they may help you to determine the main points you’ll add to your foremost props.
Last blocking
To complete the blocking stage, we’ll add our foremost belongings to our composition, fascinated by the directional circulate. For instance, the home doorways are pointing to the tree, as a result of it’s the focal curiosity level now. This might change slightly within the subsequent illustration steps, however the central motion might be in that focal space.
At this point, you’ll need to add the details thinking about the read direction and natural lines of your illustration.
Details & more details
The blocking process is ended, it’s time to add the extra details, but we’ll see it in the next chapter.
