learning provençal landscape design for a gift exchange

[merelydovely]

At long last, the behind-the-scenes masterpost I've been threatening to make for my Sewerexchange gift art! Lots of big images behind the cut.

The gift recipient, akatonbo, had asked for illustrations to go with their existing Valvert post-Seine work, It's Empty in the Valley of Your Heart. (For those of you not in the Les Mis fandom, "post-Seine" means "after Javert commits suicide by jumping into the Seine"—the fic therefore takes place in the afterlife!) In the Sewerchat discord where this gift exchange was based, akatonbo had posted several images of the house they'd designed in the Sims that was meant to look like the house from their story, along with Sims that represented their preferred designs for Valjean and Javert. So I was starting from a pretty strong place, reference-wise.

I'm not very good at either perspective or detailed backgrounds, so my next move was to take some free-tier landscaping software I had lying around and rebuild the Sims house with my landscaping software. This involved a lot of meticulous counting of the faintly-visible Sims tiles, extrapolating exactly how many feet that ought to represent. Because it was free-tier only, the landscaping software (UVision) didn't have a lot of plant options, so I just used what they had.

I added the only two available human figures and seated them so they could be moved to roughly the right height and posture of two kneeling adult men, then wrangled the landscape software around to about the right eyeline and made a photoshop composite with this image and a Javert who is not Philip Quast but turned up in my image search for Quast!vert and had the right head angle.

Finally it was time for my first messy attempt at a sketch. I knew I wasn't going to be able to provide any amount of detail based on those crappy free-tier flowers, though, so I had to head over to 3dWarehouse to scrape together better plant options.

At the same time, I also had to do better than just dumping a dozen of the same plant in a row—Valjean had worked as a gardener at the Petit-Picpus convent for many years, he'd know what he was doing when it came to conventional garden layout. So I had to go looking for references on what French garden style would've been like in the 1830s.

This led to fun discoveries like On the Life of the Jobbing Gardener, which was an invaluable resource as far as gardening clothes, though I didn't end up using any of the information beyond "it's totally normal for gardeners to keep their coats on apparently."

I also dug into what makes a garden French.

Known for their distinct, symmetrical lines, precisely trimmed hedges and shrubs, simple color palettes, stone elements, and use of lavender (they are French, after all!), French-style gardens have a long history as the most formal gardens and outdoor spaces you're likely to see.

This confirmed I couldn't get away with a total mess of greenery and blooms like you'd see arranged around an overgrown English cottage. And the gravel of the ground needed to be clearly visible to complete the look. I was going to need to mark off sections with hedges! And lavender. Gotta have lavender. Plus, underplanting with smaller herbs like rosemary and thyme. Hydrangeas, dahlias, and lamb's ear seemed to predominate.

For ideas on actual plant species, I started researching gardens designed for Provence, where Toulon is located. There's no particular guarantee that Valjean was actually from that part of the south of France just because he was imprisoned there, but I did like the idea of him redeeming it for his garden, and the dry summers and mild winters of a Mediterranean climate always did seem more heavenly to me than anything else.

So I dutifully poked through 10 Garden Ideas to Steal From Provence and looked at all the pages I could find from Provence Style: Decorating With French Country Flair. Phlomis, bearded iris, and sage were added to my list. Old stone was also confirmed to be a good choice to the front wall, and with it came the roses. I didn't have space for a pergola or arbor, but I did have the wall of the house, and onto that went the wisteria vines.

The tulips were my own Dutch affectation. I also stuck in a fountain, although that ended up not being visible in the final angle chosen.

As you can see, this design gave me much more to work with in terms of a functional, realistic background reference to work from.

The sketch started out pretty rough in the foreground area—I had the vague idea I was going to blur it in the end anyway—but the character designs took a lot of time to nail down, especially the hands.

Starting to block in the color areas!

For complicated digital pieces, I typically use the "flats" approach that I learned from the DC Comics Guide to Coloring and Lettering Comics forever ago. I don't follow their method to the letter—I just create a flats layer, or several, rather than being fancy and making a flats channel in black and white. Doing flats like this (in nice wacky contrasting colors) makes it easy to grab a whole section if I want to color-adjust or add lighting gradients to show depth of field.

First round of color! A tiny bit of rendering here and there but mostly just getting the basics down.

Getting there! This is very close to being done. What's missing is the foreground rendering, which was intended to be totally lineless, and any other painting over the lineart I wanted to do. The bearded irises and the red dahlias are also missing their color holds (i.e. their lineart is still black.)

And now here it is, the final file (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧

Here are the flowers that have a little bit of narrative significance to match akatonbo's fic:

• Burgundy roses for devotion
• White roses for new beginnings
• Blue hydrangea for forgiveness
• Red dahlia for perseverance
• White dahlia for innocence

As mentioned, backgrounds and composition are not my strong suits, so I'm very proud of how much work I put into this to make those elements good.

If you want to skip straight to the goods, or if you'd like to leave some kudos, come say hi to the finished product here on AO3!

Comments

[vitxch]

This is so interesting! I love seeing your process!

[merelydovely]

Thanks so much! I have a hard time generally with long-term projects (ADHD struggles) so I'm very satisfied that I actually managed to break this down into steps.