I began work on Figure Drawing Garden during the 2020 lockdown. The initial idea was to build a very simple tool for myself to practice figure drawing at home. It would consist of a simple flat plane in Unity with a couple of statues, equally spaced apart, which I could walk around and draw.
However, after adding a statue or two, before I even began drawing - I got distracted. I tweaked the lighting, added fog and some leaves blowing in the wind. But each time I went to actually use the tool to draw I'd think of something else to add. To make the garden more interesting for myself I decided to have the statues spawn randomly.
A spawner object would first pick a random stand, then that stand would spawn a random statue which would be orientated a random direction. This little variation made it more enjoyable and I found myself spending longer drawing each time. But this simple method of creating random variation could later also be applied to generating the garden too.
Photo credit: Imaginibus / Garlands in Paris
For the look and feel of the garden I was inspired by two places I had visited the previous year while living in Paris. The first were the Louvre's sculpture gardens - Cour Puget and Cour Marly, which I missed as they had been one of my favourite places to draw.
The second were the gardens at Versailles - or moreso the feeling of being alone in them. While visiting there was a sudden thunderstorm. Almost everyone ran back to the palace. Strangely, classical music continued playing from speakers hidden inside the bushes and mixed with the boom of thunder. After the storm cleared the garden was practically empty.
Photo Credit: Stacy's Books