Maggie's Loft Development Diary (Patreon)

Hi Guys! It’s Léa!

I would like to officially announce that starting today, I’m working full time on Paralives!

This week, I’m taking over the Patreon’s page to talk to you more about our artistic work on Paralives! This is a new format, so feel free to give us some feedback!

So here is our first development diary and the process behind the creation of Maggie’s loft.

Alex, Roxane and I took some time to imagine who could be our first Parafolk. Maggie (named last week, thanks to you guys) is an independent woman, she’s a scientist, passionate about astronomy. She loves music, star gazing, roller skating and tropical plants. Single without children, she lives alone with her cat. She prefers to use her bike because she really cares about the environment.

These were important elements about her and her personality that we wanted to find in her loft. We started by looking for references on what we wanted: an industrial look, with a lot of plants and huge bookcases, but also small hints about what Maggie loves. It had to look rough but also comfy and homey.

After finding what mood we were aiming for, Alex created an empty loft for us so we could start imagining what we could do in this place. 

At this point we spent some time looking for ways to make this place work with Maggie’s personality. Creating elements that could fit in the loft and also be used again for different styles of interior design. We used a Color Code to give a feeling of unity in the room and we tried to use colors that are trendy for this season.  

We are giving a lot of attention to adding details and improving the graphic aspect of Paralives while creating new content. Here, we jumped on the occasion to improve the brick texture that we had.  

We gave it more details and made the bricks smaller so it would not look like construction blocks. Here you can find Alex’s process to improve the texture: 

Steps 1, 2, 3: Draw the bricks with 3 different tones

Step 4: Draw some white lines between the bricks 

Step 5: Fade some of those lines

Step 6: Add a darker overlay on some of the bricks to add some contrast!

Like with the rest of our textures, you will be able to use the Color Wheel on the bricks. That’s why the texture is made in light grey!

As you all already know, we are a very small team, which means that we work as equals and everyone can give feedback on the work created. It allows us to improve things and give you guys the best results.

Let’s take this Monstera that I’ve made for example:

This is not the plant that you can find in Maggie’s loft because we improved it quite a bit. Here is the feedback that Roxane and Alex gave me about the plant: 

Thanks to those indications that we call “Paint overs”, I knew exactly what I needed to do in order to improve my Monstera. We use this tool as much as possible and it’s always nice to have feedback from your team!

Here is the result:

And Maggie’s Loft is finally ready to be revealed! Check out the video on Youtube if you haven't already: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIqTswEEcL0 

I hope you liked this little sneak peak of our work process!

Take care and stay safe!

Léa