Behind The Scenes: Gift Shop Illustration (Patreon)

Christmas is almost here, so I thought it's a great time to create some Xmas themed artwork. And it's been some time, since I did a stylized shop illustration so I felt it's agreat opportunity to practice some decorations.

Last year, I did a bit more traditional toy workshop illustration and tried to incorporate more traditional colors like red and green, but it gave me bit of a headache to make it work and look in a pleasant way.

So this time, I decided to go for more down to earth and stylish decoration with much more restrictive color range. At the same time, I wanted to keep really festive mood, so I kept my eyes open for opportunities to use gold and silver materials :)

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I attacked the Pinterest and searched for Chrismas gift shop and boy, were the results plentiful. But Christmas theme offers a very wide range of, let's say taste and it took quite some time to pick images with a bit more calm and cohesive mood :)

I've taken a lot of inspiration from the handmade gift shops and collected a variety of product shots and shelves. This time, I didn't find any shop layout, that would really inspire me, so I've just put together a lot of details, that I simply assembled while doing a sketch. Sometimes, you're lucky and the inspiration drops right in front of you while researching. Other times like this, you just really have to dig deeper and pick the pieces.

As I said, I wanted to go for really calm and earthy designs, so I've incorporated elements like traditional arch doorway, or barrel as a product display. Partly, this scene is inspired by my earlier bakery design, at least when it comes to room layout and furniture placements.

I found a very cute images of little shelves and although these were assorted pins, I thought it would be great to create some kind of candy shelf in the back. Also, glass is a very cool material to work with, so I've took inspiration from one of the large glass jar images filled with either soaps or some bath products.

Finally, when it came to decorations, I wanted to use a fir branches and found nice image with a storefront that led me to hanging the garland over the window. Some metallic ball ornaments were next and I saw a nicely decorated window shop display with large metallic stars and hand lettering, so I just flipped it inside :)

I was anxious to see, how I will be able to create a stylized fir branches, that would fit into this, but luckily, array modifier and simple particle system was enough. In the end, I think they look great and there was one little accidental trick, that really helped. I used dark green color, but set the material on these branches to metallic, so it really has that silver fir feeling to it.

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

Cheers!