Stilt Village

This project was based on the tutorial by Kevin Jick. I loved the theme and wanted to try my hand at making a dense and complex environment that felt believable and lived in.

I started by gathering reference for the setting and architecture, mostly based on fishing villages and traditional buildings from various parts of east Asia. I also got reference for similar styles of work from other artists for additional inspiration.

Once I had enough reference and knew the direction I wanted to go in, I sketched out some compositions, focusing on values to create a sense of depth and scale and including leading lines and points of interest for the viewer to follow.

I then went into Blender and created a trim sheet to build up the various assets I would use for the scene and kitbashed them together until the composition matched the initial sketches.

Finally after the rendering the scenes I brought them into Photoshop for the paintover, recreating the depth from the sketches and polishing any areas that were lacking from the render, and checking back to my reference to make sure I was hitting the mood I was aiming for at the start.

Overall the process Kevin Jick goes over in the tutorial is very similar to my own so I mostly just referred to it for the main concept and some minor tricks along the way but it was a really fun exercise and I'm pleased with the result. Also thanks for reading this far, I hope you enjoyed my work or learned something, and make sure to check out the original tutorial by Kevin Jick.