Behind The Scenes: Barbecue Illustration (Patreon)

I'm doing new scenes every week for some time now and I never struggled that much for inspiration. Not that I don't have bleak moments. There are times, that you simply don't have anything that exciting you want to make. No next big thing, that would help you push yourself to another level.

I learned to embrace this. So there are no big ideas waiting for you and you went through your list of ideas that seemed so interesting last week. And still nothing? Ok, just go with the flow, take a look around you. What season it is? What month? Is there anything happening around this date? Is weather anything special? There are so many things, that can be observed in the moment and transformed into piece of work. Think of it as a photography.

It's the second week, that we have 30 degree celsius weather. For me, the ultimate start of the summer season is having friends over for a outdoor barbecue. And if you think about it, you have hundred different ways, how it can look.

Visit the full Pinboard here

And it has another benefit. Take it as an opportunity to slow down. Instead of rushing to that next big thing, you're just goofing around, enjoying the atmosphere of that moment and making it part of the experience.

It's like listening to christmas carols at work just before the holidays right? For some reason, doesn't feel like that much of a hard work. Because there might be a reason, why you didn't feel like making the next big thing. Maybe you pushed too hard for some time. Another reason to shift gears and enjoy the ride.

Suddenly, image search on Pinterest didn't feel like a research, but more like procrastination and looking for garden remake ideas.

Found some really inspiring garden barbecue setups, so I sharpened up my pencil (That's a lie, I use mechanical 2B pencil) and sketched out some layout. I had four major things to include from my research. Brick oven was a must have, followed closely by a swing, table and tree.

To avoid having the final result too much symmetrical, I've move the table more in the middle of the scene, while keeping the other corners filled with details. 

Production was quite smooth and most of the heavy lifting was made by high quality textures from Substance Source library and Botaniq addon, that took care of all the grass, flowers and tree.

Something, that could have been a chore suddenly turned to a summer breeze :)

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! :)