Behind The Scenes: Retro Room (Patreon)

If you want create something, that leaves an impact on your audience, you need to deliver some kind of emotion, that can connect with person. One of the strongest form of emotion is nostalgia. It's a bittersweet feeling you get, when browsing through your old camera roll, trying to grasp those moments, that are forever gone.

It may sound calculated, but if you can find a common shared nostalgia moment and share it, it can create a strong connection. That's why I love to create older pop culture references. Because when I post something like that, we all get teleported for a moment to a certain point in our lives, that we share in some form.

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Recently I started to remake some of my older works and I stumbled upon one of my popular pieces - 80's hacker room. What I realized, it's more of an old school arcade mancave, than hacker place. And all that retro tech and references is the thing that worked in the first place.

I've looked up some similar references and found some nice room illustrations, filled with old PC's, Nintendos and other 80's stuff. And I had my new piece right away. Only thing left, was to frame it the right way. Lot of the references were varying from childhood rooms to teenager dens and I was more interested in the latter, so I had to filter out some childish stuff.

Sometimes, when I need to collect a lot of individual references, it helps to create a modeling TODO list. Pinterest has the feature to include notes in the board and that's what I like to use (just remember the notes in Pinterest don't autosave 😅).

After I had the initial theme and concept figured out and made the list of all the objects I need to include and model, it was time for the good ol' pen and paper brainstorm.

This phase was mostly about figuring out the layout and object density in the scene. Will it be a single bed or a double. Windows? Door? Don't dwelve on the quality of your sketch, prepare your eraser and try multiple blockouts and once you find layout that's pleasing to look at and feels balanced, sketch out the details and distribute objects.

Recently, I was thinking about sharing this process in some new form. Would be some of you maybe interested in live stream of this preparation process, or at least a breakdown video?

Let me know :)

You can watch the process video on Youtube