Behind The Scenes: Wild West (Patreon)

This might seem unrelated, but bear with me for a while. Last week I went to see Dune movie and that was a pretty big occasion for me. I've grown on Dune videogames and Lynch's movie adaptation and I have a pretty hefty Dune books collection. I so wanted this movie to be good. And what do you know, it was! I loved almost every minute of it.

At this point, it's a bit of a habit for me to watch new movies with some part of my brain dedicated to capturing diorama-worthy moments. I especially loved the vehicle and armor design here, so I went home and sketched out the potential diorama. Glad I had the sketch ready so early in the week, I woke up the next morning and threw it out.

Not that it was totally bad, but there was something off. I had this hunch before and didn't act on it and almost always it didn't work so well. This time, I was ready to listen and move on to something else, because I didn't have much time left to perfect this theme. I scrolled through my works and realized, I've never done a wild west theme. I got so excited, that there are still some general themes I didn't explore yet.

Visit the full Pinboard here

I gathered some western references and started to browse through them. I really loved the corner saloon building, but corner buildings are always hard to pull off composition-wise.

There is a lot of empty space left and you would need a lot of props to fill the scene. So I focused on a few more buildings and really liked the cartoon sheriff's office with a star on the wall. Image slowly started to form in my head, so I went and sketched the idea.

I went for a partial building design for the Sheriff's office, just to suggest, that this is actually a town street, not an isolated building. Layout started to look promising, so I jumped in and out of reference board to find some more details, like the cacti, wanted board and a broken wheel. And of course, in the late 19th century, there was a telegraph! Pole it is. Btw. do you know, how did they call the thing to tie your horse to? Hitching rail. The more you know...

Sketching is the phase, where your idea really comes forward for the first time and you can see, if it's worth your while to iterate, or whether it's better to scratch it (like the Dune sketch). Of course, you invested some time already and it's easy to ride the sunken cost train, but your past mistakes should be enough to trigger your inner manager.

But that won't come by itself. Making mistakes is easy too, but having the discipline of hitting the pause and analyze them is something else. It needs to be deliberate. Stop, analyze and point out to yourself, what went wrong. If you can't see it, ask for opinion. Anything that helps to save the experience for later.

If you do this on a regular basis and don't forget to debrief, you will build a strong inner voice, that can give you early stage suggestions. You just need to be ready to listen. 

You can watch the process video on Youtube