Behind The Scenes: Dieselpunk Illustration (Patreon)

Sometimes, when you don't feel like looking into new inspiration, you can always revisit your older scenes and see, if there's something that can be developed further. I did this several times with my original Cloud 66 series (that served as a base for Episode 4 in the course), and created more artworks, that fit into the world and style. Recently I published them on Behance too.

So I felt it's time to explore this a bit more and I really loved the dieselpunk theme, so I buckled up and started to search for reference. My dieselpunk images are kind of a mashup between the 30's art deco architecture and 40's and 50's vehicles. I don't mind, since it's further mixed up with sci-fi elements anyway. 

By the way, this is sometimes reffered to as decopunk too, and you might know the style from the Batman animated series.

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I started the search with buildings with no idea of what I want to model, but from the earlier artworks, I knew the proportions it would need to have. I gathered some art deco buildings and moved to search for the 40's cars when the police car jumped at me and I knew right away what I wanted to do. 

You can see, how all the creativity is often a thing of accident, but at the same time comes from a process. So if you prepare well enough and set yourself for these accidents, they're bound to happen eventually.

I searched for more buildings with focus on police stations and gathered up enough reference to move onto the sketching phase.

I had my preferable deco building, but the scene needed some smaller parts too for a bit more interesting layout. I had a whole low poly police compound in the reference and there was this little guard booth that inspired me to include here as well.

I loved one building in particular, with these column-like support structures in the front, that make it look monumental, if not a bit sinister. In combination with distopian police, it's the ideal setup I was looking for.

I found out, that the police car is probably a 1936 Plymouth Coupe and I had trouble searching for the reference, so I used only the side image view in the modeling process and eyeballed the rest of the car proportions.
That wraps the insights for the isometric dieselpunk illustration this week. Thanks for reading and I hope it will help you with some of your projects.

See you on the next one!