Behind the Scenes: Viking Hall (Patreon)

This week I went back to my list and just picked a theme. Vikings were sitting there for quite some time and I was in a mood for another room design.

I've thought about the best way to approach it, and this image of a long hall with fireplace in the middle, surrounded with tables, immediately popped into my head. From the experience, I knew I was in a bit of a trouble. If I were to fit this hall on a isometric illustration, I would need to solve the layout.

Visit the full Pinboard here

I researched the theme on Pinterest and created a board. I was interested in everything from whole rooms and halls ideas all the way to chairs, pillars, furniture and small details like cups. Creating a broad picture like this is very important to get into the theme and really try to understand the style. After seeing all the details, I thought this is a great case for mild stylization (in terms of proportions) and more realistic textures and materials.

I found amazing colorful hand-painted illustration that served as a great reference point of what I had in mind previously. What scared me a bit, was a lot of carvings and symbols displayed all around. Not that it's so hard to do it, it's just very time consuming. I'm working with very limited timeframe of few hours and drawing and preparing Viking carvings wasn't going to cut it. Especially, when this was going to be fully textured diorama.

When you have a lot of time consuming details, the best you can do is reduce number of details :D I know, this sounds somewhat obvious, but it's not always the case. Sometimes you get so fixed on some idea, that you follow the initial concept no matter what. Take the time to stop and rethink. Is there a ways how to make the scope of the project smaller?

When I started the rough sketch process, I found out, that not only I can, I will have to. Idea like a viking hall is really too much for a small isometric format. But how can I deliver the emotion of that fireplace in the middle?

Human brain and it's ability to finish parts of the image and come to conclusions is really admirable. And I used it to my advantage here, by cutting the image in half (quarter, in fact). When you look at the half of the watermelon, do you know what you're looking at and how the whole thing looks like? Of course you do.
So if you ever saw a Viking hall with central fireplace you will immediately identify, why the roof is cut in the middle :)

And it comes with another advantage. Less objects, less details and only one carved pillar to take care of should be enough to deliver the satisfying result in time :)

You can watch the process video on Youtube