Interior design with Mr Raccoon

Drawing rooms can be a long boring task, but I wanted a believable cozy environment for Mr Raccoon. Fortunately it was a minimal one because Mr Raccoons, as we know, hates clutter!

I started by finding the perspective I needed and traced the main walls. You can do this by creating a perspective grid or by downloading one. Something that looks like this:

Then I draw the walls: I make walls with 2 layers: one for the texture, one with the colour, I put the colour layer in multiply mode so you see through but still can change the colour whenever you want.

I used a wood texture I simplified a bit for the floor and made sure to transform it so that the perspective was ok.

Then I looked for some furniture. I use photo references and I trace on them. Sometimes if they have a special texture I use some filter to cut out the extra colour, as in the case of the cushion he meditates on.

For the shojis, the japanese doors, I built one and duplicated it wherever I needed it. If you are using photoshop, the smart object feature lets you create templates so if you have to change something later, every window you made will change accordingly.With time you can create your library of furniture to speed up your interior design process.

At that point everything was still a bit messy flat and random colored. What I did next was: Arranging the furniture where I needed it Adding shadows: mainly shading the corners of the room and all the edges between the walls.

Next I added the outdoor scenery: a garden that I modified to make it look bright, saturated and a bit blurred.

You see in the pictures above the final colours, but this is how everything looked like before I…

chose a color palette. This is an important step. I wanted all the colour in the scene to make sense. There are different palette generating tool you can use. I like this one: https://coolors.co/app

I decided that my main colour would be the red of Mr Raccoon’s kimono and so I chose the other colours accordingly. Then I saved the palette and went back to my room trying to adjust the hue of everything so that it fell into one of my colours.The final result was so much better this way!