Behind The Scenes: Haunted Manor (Patreon)

One of my favorite times of the year is finally here. Don't get me wrong, I love summer and high temperatures, but it's the fall, when my productivity starts to rise again. There's something about summer, that just keeps you from work with constant barbecues and naps. 

And it's also aesthetically more pleasing. Taking a walk when the nature starts to change, fog appears and the light has otherworldly color temperatures. No surprise, this is the season of long evenings, spooky tales and horror movies.

I don't care the Halloween is only one day in the end of October the same way I don't care it's not celebrated in Europe (at least not officially). I just love it as a pop-culture theme and I always look forward to create something spooky (basically all month long).

Visit the full Pinboard here

Two years ago, I already created a haunted house image, but I have chosen a low poly stylized representation. This year, I wanted to kick off the year by doing the same thing in a different style. Sometimes this can be a great practice. You take something you already made, and dissect it down and analyze it with your older brain. Then you slice the idea, repurpose and put together in a new way. A little Frankenstein's monster if you will ::)

I went on a Pinterest to put together a good reference board. I was mostly looking at architecture style of the different haunted house images. Also, the stylization level plays a huge role. There is a lot out there with really stylized and cartoonish proportions and you need to make a choice, what style you're creating and try to stick to it (even if you use these cartoon references for detail and lighting inspiration). Otherwise, these references can sway you in a different directions and you create a monster you never intended.

I isolated few references I wanted to include. I wanted a stair entrance with pillars and small roof, some kind of terrace in the back and little bit of interesting architecture elements, like alcoves and towers.

What I do in case like that is drag some chosen ref images in PureRef and crop them to only focus on the parts I like, for example some small detail, or roof decoration.

The sketching process really helps with this, because I can see beforehand if the composition I'm building works. Here I sketched the two main parts of the building first and saw it was off balance. After some thought I added the narrow tower in the back to balance it out.

If you'd jump right into 3d modeling software and found out at the end your composition is off, you might need a quite a lot of work to figure it out. Not mentioning the frustration. No matter your sketching skills, always try to imagine your final work before modeling, you will thank yourself later.

You can watch the process video on Youtube