The Cute Cottage

by Monica A. Lazar 15:15 0 comentarii

I consider this cottage as being a real challenge. Apart from the fact that it needed 12 different textures, I had to keep in mind the chromatic range I have to stick to. I knew from the start the roof is going to be blue, so I set for having textures based on the red colour for the rest of my cottage.  Red and blue seemed to be a nice mix, but the thing that really bothered me was the arch of the door. Initially, this was blue, but I felt like I put it too much in the background, when I really wanted it to be in the lime lights. I decided eventually to set the colour a little bit to green, so that the crystals draw the attention. The texture had so much impact on me that I decided to apply it more than once and the pillars were made in the perfect shape to do so. The loops of the pillar were all covered in crystal and so were the extrusions which link together its body and the base.

Initially, I wanted to create a cottage made out of sweets but I abandoned this idea as soon as I realised my concept is not going to work unless I hand paint all of my textures. I still wasn't discouraged, but after my first texture (which took me a lot of time, as it's incredibly hard to make sweets actually look delicious!), I decided to give up this idea for a more practical one, which is depicted by the rendering above.

As this is the cottage of a forest creature (I was thinking about a midget sprite, to be honest :D), I have never wanted to lose this fictional aspect of it, so my colours needs to be bright and bold. I found some of the textures on the blogs of different artists (Ulrick Wery, Justin Mesner, Lazaruz), but I was still needed to paint behind them with brighter shades than the actual texture and set them on "Hard Light", in order to give them this cartoony look I craved so much for.