Behind The Scenes: Lumber Yard Game Illustration (Patreon)

I remember playing Settlers 2 on my old computer and just loving all those little houses and huts, all the craftsmen places and castles. I can still hear the sound of timber sawing and clingy blacksmith sounds.

There was almost no 3d games back in the day and all those sprites and assets were hand drawn pixel by pixel. Later, game artists used 3d software to prerender the assets and use them as 2d sprites instead.

I always loved that technique and I wanted to create a game art series, so I set myself to create illustrated tile series, that could be just as easily used as a transparent prerendered sprite on a game map.

Visit the full Pinboard here

I wasn't starting from scratch here, I already created a blacksmith house recently and I really liked the outcome. So I wanted to use it as a baseline for stylization, overall style and colors. That's why I included it in the reference board and started searching for similar images. 

The decision fell on the lumber yard, as it's probably the most common thing you can find in strategy game along with a blacksmith.

I mostly stayed away from the 3d assets, because I didn't want to stray into recreating someone's work. Instead, I focused on 2d and painted images, that could guide a inspire me with details and some general information on how a lumber yard could look like.

One detail, that has really driven my layout decision, was the saw mill, that used a water wheel to drive the saw. I really loved the idea and I wanted to incorporate a little of that technical detail in my scene as well.

That led to a decision to separate the house and the saw mill and create a little bit more complex structure. I really didn't have any idea how to put it together, so the sketching process is a huge help at this point. There were a lot of back and forth drawing and erasing until I was able to map out the buildings.

And all those smaller details, like roof, window grid, lantern hanging over the saw mill are a result of the reference exploration phase. If you go carefully around the Pinterest board, you can find the details there, they are just scattered across multiple images. I really love this process, when you can get inspired by multiple things and come up with something original and yours.

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

See you in the next one! :)