I decided to go abstract with this latest post. With this set of illustrations, I have been studying the interior spaces of the Desert House. I tend to prefer interiors with minimal color and material, so I generated these studies as a way to force me out of that way of thinking. Also, the exterior renderings were a little more serious and detailed, so I wanted to switch things up and have a little fun with these. One thing about minimal images is that inserting just a little texture can really change the reading of the illustration. In this case, just a hint of plaster texture on the walls gives the images a painterly quality. Below is a quick break down of one of the images.

 

 

1. V-Ray Base Rendering

 

For the V-Ray base rendering, I simply applied some colors close to what I was looking for knowing that I would tweak them later in Photoshop.

 

The Material ID that rendered out of V-Ray was crucial for me to make fast selections. Each color represents a zone that will take on a very specific color in Photoshop. I have talked about Material ID in more depth in this POST.

 

 

2. Add Color

 

Next, I took each zone of color and created a mask of that specific area in Photoshop so that I could dial in the color. In the image above, I adjusted the center pink zone to be lighter and more saturated. I wasn’t trying to be realistic so I wasn’t concerned about washing out the shadows a little bit.

 

Above, the image shows what the illustration looked like once I had all of the colors adjusted in each zone.

 

 

3. Texture

 

I added a simple plaster texture to all of the walls to break up some of the smoothness of the color gradients. I wanted to do this in Photoshop so that I could dial in how strong the texture was. It is important to note that I still distorted the perspective of the plaster texture to match the wall angles. If it sounds like a lot of work, it isn’t because I was able to use the color zone masks used in the previous step to speed this process up.

 

 

4. Color Adjust and Noise

 

At this point, I began adjusting the overall image. I first lightened the images and increased the saturation. I also added just a hint of noise. I describe how to add noise in step six of this POST.

 

 

5. HDR

 

Finally, I added a slight HDR effect that amplifies the contrast and textures. I used Topaz to generate the HDR effect.

 

 

Final Images