I mentioned in a post earlier this week that I need to try and be a bit more adventurous with my scenery designs. So today I tried out a new working process when designing a palace/chateau for the story (where Cinderella lives at the beginning, and where Rapunzel will be up in a tower).
I started off by finding a few images of palaces/chateaus that I liked on Pinterest:
Using these images as reference I then started to do some quick sketches of some of the interesting elements of the buildings, joining them together as I went, to create a new building with an array of different turrets, windows, roofs etc:
I then used these drawings in the same that I used my observational sketches from the Zoo and the New Forest, developing them into my own style of detailed line drawings:
I scanned this drawing in and gave it a bit of colour just to see how it would look:
I think this process has worked pretty well for me today and helped me to be much more adventurous and creative with my designs. I would definitely not have come up with something like the above image if I just drew from imagination or directly from photographs of palaces. I think I'm going to continue using this process over the next week whilst I continue to work on the scenery illustrations.