Behind the Scenes: Rick & Morty

This one was a funny curveball. When working on the Back to the Future last week, my mind immediately wandered to Rick and Morty. The main characters are really entertaining parody of Doc and Marty and I really felt the sudden urge to go watch some time travel cartoon madness.

And you know what that means. Making the most out of this enjoyment and translating it into creative inspiration. I remembered I made R&M inspired diorama before, so I looked it up and inspected.

It's a great fun to go back and rework older ideas. One of two things happen. Either you hate the old piece and immediately see hundred ways you can make it better. That's the good one. It means progress. It means your skills over time developed. The other one is not so pleasant. It's when you feel admiration for your older piece. Felling like "wow, I made that".

Visit the full Pinboard here

The latter means, you might have lost your way a bit. That even if the older work is not technically on par with your current pieces, there was some spark that resulted in a very pleasant result.

In this case, I leaned more towards the first feeling. But at the same time, I felt it had a great composition. So much so, I decided to take it as is and only make it more compact and more stylized, closer to the style I'm currently making.

But I still needed to go and make a new reference board. I didn't want to count on my past observations and wanted to take a fresh look.

One thing that struck me, was the fact I avoided the garage shelf in the older one. Probably because I felt it won't fit the composition I chose. At the time, I was making the proportions a bit more realistic.

But now I only saw an empty space. I knew it will be challenging to compress everything so much and still make it readable, but this time I really didn't want to leave out the important shelf with "time travel stuff" and medieval weaponry. Essential garage equipment.

To make sure I do it right this time, I made a new sketch from scratch and really paid attention to scale and proportions, moving things around and compressing them together to make room for the shelf. 

I think in the end, it gave a great balance to the composition, while still keeping the best angle of the room, that allows me to use window i.e. emission light that provides the most natural room lighting.

You can watch the process video on Youtube.