Behind The Scenes: Paris (Patreon)

It was a longer time since I did the real city diorama, so I felt excited to go and create a new one right away. I still keep a list of cities and picked the Paris. It's a long time since I visited, but I can still remember the atmosphere and ambience, the smells and emotion of the sunset Paris. 

There are only two conditions when I'm looking for the city series diorama. First, I don't want to include any particular landmarks. This forces me to look further and find essence of the city in a form of a small details, architecture style and details.

Second, there has to be an iconic vehicle involved. Doesn't have to be a car, but so far I always ended up with cars. Combination of these two elements can can help to create unique diorama and capture the city atmosphere without showing any well known places.

By the way, if you have a good suggestion for a city and you can name the iconic vehicle with it, I would be ever grateful if you reply to this email and let me know :)

Visit the full Pinboard here

I've started to gather some Pins for the board and very quickly came to a conclusion, that the right vehicle for the job will be no other than legendary Citroen 2CV. It has a distinct shape and cuteness, that fits well into a stylized environment. There was also other contender and I decided to keep him in the board, and that's the legendary Citroen DS. Ah, I'll have to get back to that one day.

I was searching for places to capture, but I was drawn to Montmartre district all the time. I remember loving the atmosphere of the narrow streets and artistic soul of the place (Picasso lived there).

I found several references, that I loved, but most of the time I don't do real places, I just get inspired by them. I reached out to a friend about the most iconic places on Montmartre and he sent me a location of Le Moulin de la Galette and I instantly knew I had to do it as is was. The arch, green overgrowth, everything was just perfect.

So, this week I lucked out on the real world location, so I didn't have to come up with my own composition right? Wrong :) The thing is, the most iconic thing there is the windmill and I was inclined to include it.

But the moment I started the sketch process with the car, it became obvious I wouldn't fit all of it and that I have to make a cutout of the place. I decided to make the arch and the overgrown terrace the most prominent and filled the rest of the space with a lot of details like traffic signs, lamp post and various tiles and curbs.

Once I got the general geometry layout, the rest was pretty easy to fill, because I could just use Google Street View as a direct reference and look around the scene from multiple angles.

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 work.

See you in the next one! :)