Behind The Scenes: Classroom (Patreon)

It's now almost two decades since I went to school and it still stings, when the Summer ends and September comes. A lot of nostalgia and emotions. Not always good, but strong in any case. Great theme for a new design this week.

There are lots of ways, how to deliver these emotions. You could for example do a small scale still life scene with some school accessories. Sometimes, the small part of a bigger picture works better than the whole thing, because it leaves a lot for imagination and connects better.

I decided to for may own thing and that's a room diorama with the classroom. I can remember those September mornings with the lazy sun shining through the blinds and monotonous voice of the teacher. 

Visit the full Pinboard here

I started to gather some images on Pinterest and created a board. It may seem a little redundant, since I have my own memories of a classroom, but there are two reasons, why it's always a good idea to do a reasearch. First, you memories might deceive you and can be skewed. Second, the world si large and I needed to see, how other classrooms might look like. If I want to connect with large audience, I need to see it all and extract similarities.

While browsing through these images, I saved some lighting and mood reference as well and I really liked a bit older and retro classrooms with the chalkboard. That's why I went for more outdated approach, which should support the nostalgia even more.

The rest was about gathering even more images of the classrooms, so I can see the furniture and equipment, that I don't want to leave out.

I sketched the boundaries of the room and immediately ran into a problem. How many desks and chairs will I include? The first impulse was to have at least few desks, so it's apparent, that it's a classroom. But the rest of the details would get a bit lost in the scale and I would only achieve repetition and boredom. 

It's similar to what I said in the beginning. Even small portion of few student books and pencils would deliver the message, and on a room scale it's the same. Since I work with only two walls, I can create a cutout of the room and the rest can be left for imagination. This way, I can make everything a bit larger and focus on the details and overall feeling of the scene.

So I sketched only two desks including teacher's and marked places for windows, furniture and board. I liked the layout and scale, so I refined the sketch and went back to the board to get some inspiration. That's how the globe, plant and clock came to be.

After I modeled everything, it felt a bit empty on the side and unbalanced. It's great to keep the board at hand even when deep in the modeling process, because if you run into some struggle, you can always go fishing for inspiration. And there it was. A skeleton! 

To be honest, I didn't have much time left for modeling, and skeleton would take long, so I simply went to Blendswap and got it there: https://blendswap.com/blend/13239

You can watch the process video on Youtube