Behind the Scenes: Pizzeria Illustration (Patreon)

I guess the 2023 is a year of reworks and retrospective for me. I often find myself browsing through my older works looking for opportunities to improve, or transfer to another style. And that exactly is the story with the latest one. I wanted to see, if I can bring the colorful and stylized pizzeria illustration into a more semi-realistic setting using textures.

But I didn't just want to take the old layout and slap some textures on it. Reworking something is always an opportunity to look at it from the fresh perspective and look for opportunities to do something differently and hopefully better.

Visit the full Pinboard here

I grabbed the old illustration image and created a reference board to get some more restaurant and pizzeria ideas. After that, I took advantage of Midjourney AI and generated similar ideas. I used several prompts to get the results I liked and then explored them closely while taking note of the details I might use.

There were several things that I wanted to bring into the rework.

Though I already had a similar sketch on file, I started from scratch. All the new details I found in the reference board needed a fresh look. There was a window I really liked on the AI generated images, so I decided to bring it into the mix.

Also, I really liked the idea of takeaway window, so I decided to change the layout and do a small partial wall area in the front for that. That opened several new ideas, like hanging some menus on the wall and placing one on the street curb.

Very subtle changes, but all of them made for a nice design refresh. The final challenge was to make it look similar to the previous design. It was supposed to be a rework rather than a completely new thing. So I made sure I kept the wood colors and textures close to the original. Of course, some of the things needed a change, but I thing the result is pretty close.

You can watch the process video on Youtube