Who says that illustrating and making architectural images don’t count as a hobby? Well, we noticed that sometimes its good to just sit and explore to see what comes out. Here at Show It Better, we tend to do this a lot. Just explore, we don’t have a specific order of doing things.

So, you may call this a tutorial or not, but we are going to show you how this illustration came together with exploring and some mistakes along the way. Watch the video here.

Download the project file here: https://gum.co/HBLYI

Import from SketchUp

In SketchUp, we took an image and made sure it was in parallel projection before exporting it.

Before taking the image to Photoshop, we took it to illustrator, we know, we rarely do things in illustrator, so here we made some edges and completed things that were not done in SketchUp.

And also some minor details, like this detailed staircase.

Import to PhotoShop

Once we have the image in Photoshop, we just started exploring. Selecting all of the section slabs to change their color.

We and our love for textures, (by the way check out this article for free texture sites here)  so we searched for a paper texture and added it to the whole image and we used the multiply blending mode.

With that texture, the image was pretty enough already, but since we like exploring, we just kept on going. Using the SIB free brush pack, we added some trees to the illustration.

Hey if you are a Photoshop lover, you may know that photoshop comes with its own textures, you can find them by right-clicking in the layer and selecting blending options. We wanted to give these textures a try with the trees in our illustration.

To give this illustration a more of a paper feel, we took the main building and added a drop shadow to make it stand out.

Exploring and exploring, we took some elements out and the illustration also looked awesome like that! But it still wasn’t convincing enough.

After changing the color of the trees again, we decided there was a shadow missing, the building shadow. So with the polygonal lasso tool, we added a shadow and moved it behind the trees.

And when we moved it, there was an effect that was created by mistake, a monochromatic effect, and guess what?! It is what we have been looking for. We are so in love with this type of process where beautiful things just come out from exploring and some mistakes here and there.

Have you tried this technique? Were you just explore and you never know what is the result going to be? Watch the video of how it happened below!