Behind The Scenes: Retro Future (Patreon)

Most of the time, my works are one-shot attempts to catch some unique situation, or a well know popular scene. But I have few series going on, that I return to occasionally and build on previous ones. For example Cloud 66 series, that made it into my course as a lesson episode. That one is a diesel-punk art-deco inspired  dystopian futuristic theme based on 30's and 40's era aesthetics.

I wanted to bring new series to life and I was thinking a lot about different possibilities. There's a lot of chatter about UFO's lately and regardless of this topic, it reminded me of the 50's sci-fi movies, with all those funny tin foil designs and glass helmets. I set myself to explore a bit more of this atom-punk, i.e. the way people back in 50's depicted, how a 21. century should look like. 

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I've fired up a Pinterest and started munching over anything I could get my hands on.The best sources for atom-punk inspired aesthetics are animated series Futurama and then my childhood favorite Flinstones alternative - Jetsons.

I specifically searched for Jetsons environment and saved a lot of architecture shots. The reason is simple. Those are so low fidelity, that bringing something like that into 3D requires a lot of creative work, and therefore will set you on more original path, that already defined designs of Futurama.

If you'd like to search for more stuff like this, I recommend keywords like "retro futurism" and "atom punk".

The sketch phase was essential, because I had literally no idea, what I'm going to create. I started with just few lines here and there, capturing the shapes of those futuristic buildings and placing them on platforms. It took some iterations, but finally I ended up with somethin plausible, with a mall design followed by some kind of isolated park environment.

I filled in some details, like additional platforms, elevators and lot of glass bubbles. Those went on the car designs as well. Inspiration is from Jetsons again, but same as with the buildings, you really need to take those designs with a grain of salt and use more of the essence, rather than designs themselves, since they're cartoonish and really exaggerated.

So in the end, when you compare the final render with the actual references, you can clearly see the inspirations, but the result is something new, that synthesizes all of those elements.

Can't wait to explore this world a little bit more :)

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! :)