A poster graphic made as a volunteer project for City Repair‘s 2025 Village Building Convergence event.
The organizers requested a poster graphic that showed people building the world they wanted to create out of puzzle pieces. The goal was for it to evoke themes of community, inter-generational connection, co-building of spaces and futures, and connection to nature.
After some iteration and sketching, I built the puzzle-piece world in Blender, but used non-directional ambient lighting and projected textures to create a flat, illustrative style similar to a cut paper collage. This 3d illustration approach allows for easy editing and quick iteration on a design — parts of a scene can be moved, rotated, and copied as 3d objects, and cameras can be placed in different areas for different perspectives.
To keep it looking organic and hand-made, I drew texture swatches on paper using oil pastels, photographed them, and made them into tiling texture maps. I added these to the digital materials as flat projections to create the cut-paper look.
