Concept
I wanted to create a stylized urban environment, consistent with some cartoony/gangster characters I'd been working on. To help visualize the scene, as well as for some inspiration I collected together various images, primarily from the web. The final concept probably contains some aspect of each of these images below, some more so than others!
Modeling
The modeling was relatively straight forward, I roughed in the scene with some box primitives, and then once I was happy with the general composition/lighting, I worked over these initial shapes adding in more detail, mostly on focal point of the barber shop. I choose to construct all elements in a rigid fashion at first; purely to make the texturing easier, the tapering and bending was applied afterwards.
Texturing
All textured elements in the scene including the sky, ground and buildings were based on textures directly from the CD. Undoubtedly they save a great deal of time at this stage, and general purpose enough, to be used with most styles of cartoony imagery. Straight forward projection and box mapping was used throughout the scene
The central 'Clive portrait' and other specific elements were painted by hand in PhotoShop