Behind The Scenes: Tokyo Illustration (Patreon)

I've never been to Japan. I've never even been to any Asian country for that matter. But somehow, after creating some major European and American cities, I felt the need to make a Tokyo diorama.

Some things come easier than others and this one felt a bit harder to make. The culture is quite distant and the huge difference in language and writing doesn't make it better. And you might face similarly distant challenge or brief one day. Would you just pass on the opportunity? I guess not.

So what to do, when feeling clueless? First of all, it's not like I live in a vacuum, so after years of watching TV and movies, I got a glimpse of eastern culture and architecture. At least in a way, that allows me to filter out reference material.

Second, I always include a vehicle in my city dioramas and that's a topic I feel very comfortable in. Not that I'm an expert on Japanese cars, but I'm no stranger to high-revving four cylinder side-going machines from the country of the rising sun.

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It would maybe make a sense to start my research with more familiar thing, but I didn't know the context yet, so I postponed the car selection.

I started to browse the Tokyo streets on Pinterest and saving some interesting images on the board. I even opened google maps and explored some street views. Photography sites like Pexels are great place to go too, if you're in the need of some culture essence.

There was one repeating pattern - corner ramen shops with bar stool seating. I loved the concept for a side alley theme, so that's what I focused on. Next thing I needed, was a bit of architecture. That meant saving some snapshots of the older side alley buildings and extracting the information about how the roof shingles, railings and window frames look.

Only after I had enough information about the buildings and street, I moved to a car selection. It wasn't a hard thing to do, since I always include some older classic car, that goes well with the culture. I read few charts about most popular cars of the era and came up with a classic 70's Honda Civic (remember Pulp Fiction?). Toyota Corolla (AE86) was a close contender, but the vintage look prevailed.

So I had all the ingredients, the only thing left was to put it all together. I don't like to go directly to a 3d modeling phase and figure out the stuff on the fly. Whatever the quality of the sketch, knowing what to put where is essential to make the modeling streamlined and efficient.

I left quite a bit of room for street and the car and sketched out simple building with just a stripe of roof overhang, to give it some eastern vibe. Basically, the roof, window frames, railing and few Japanese writings were enough to clearly state what this is and where it's located.

About the writings, I didn't have time to go and study it in detail, so I simply copied the writings from the illustrations of the ramen shops I found. Of course, I opened google translate at least and wrote English "ramen" to see how it translates. I found the writing in one of the translations, so I knew I'm not doing something inappropriate and I wouldn't offend anyone. Hopefully.

This is one of the things I love about being a visual designer and illustrator. We need to constantly learn and improve our existing knowledge and every new brief can lead us into the unknown. Sometimes, you need to be engineer to be able to create a car engine illustration or infographics. Other times, we get to travel (at least on map) and explore new cultures to be able to deliver our interpretation and emotion.

You can watch the process video on Youtube