Behind The Scenes: Karate Kid (Patreon)

This week I picked out another one of my all time favorite childhood movies to do a tribute design. I watched Karate Kid a lot in my days and couldn't be happier to see a sequel in form of a new TV show Cobra Kai. 

I knew I would make something from a movie eventually, and wanted to start with some scene from Cobra Kai, but I wouldn't feel complete if I didn't begin with the original first. And when I think about this movie, I imagine a garden and dojo of Mr. Myiagi, where Daniel had to spent time with all that hard training.

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I always start my work in Pinterest by browsing through the references, but it was a bit difficult here. There are not that many good shots from the movie, and the shots that could help you identify the architecture and space of the garden can be counted on one hand.

I had to go and explore some video material too and make screenshots. Whatever helps you to complete the picture is great. I even discovered some aerial imagery of the movie set, which helped a lot. This way, piece by piece you can complete the overall layout of the scene and fill in the blanks.

The hardest part was still ahead. How should the final result look like? I'm not doing perspecive camera shot, so I need well rounded space that would look good in isometric view and details would not get lost. Some of these requirements come from experience. There were few times when I worked really hard on a layout, only to find out I covered too much area and the design is not readable at its scale.

The second requirement comes from emotion. There is a certain feeling I'm trying to deliver with each design. This should immediately scream Karate Kid and catch the atmosphere in the reference images. So there needs to be a house, wooden decks and part of the garden.

It was obvious from the gathered reference, that the garden with the house is too large, so I need to do a cutout. I left out some extended parts of the decks and garden and decided to include only cutout of the house. In the end, it's maybe a quarter of the backyard area. But it helps to identify all the details and deliver the emotion I'm going for, even at the cost of bending the reality and cutting some corners (literally).

You can watch the process video on Youtube
 

So that's it for the latest illustration and I hope it will help you with your own work.

See you in the next one! :)