Behind the Scenes: World in the Bottle (Patreon)

This year on vacation, a friend bought my son a ship in the bottle souvenir. A trivial thing, but fascinating still. My son was mesmerized. As I held the thing in my hands, there's something capturing in a small environment contained in the bottle like that.

Can't put my finger on it, but it inspired me nevertheless. What if the whole piece of small world was contained in there? Going on as nothing happens, like there isn't a glass wall surrounding it?

I was always building worlds like that. In a sense. Small dioramas, cutouts of the larger world, isolated in the image bounds. But now, I really wanted to isolate it and put it in the bottle. A potion of sorts.

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I went online and started to put together a reference board. I do this in Pinterest, makes it easy to share with you and I really like the Pinterest features that allow you to explore more ideas based on image similarity.

I had a lot of materials to gather. First, I wanted to have a look at existing bottles out there. I expected to find endless sea of them, but it wasn't that much actually. A majority of them were AI generated blunders, so I had to filter though them. But I saved some for color and mood reference. As a thumbnail, they work great until you start to inspect them at close.

Then I had to figure out a style for this little experiment. At first, I imagined a realistic looking diorama with realistic foliage, but the more I was looking at different inspirations, the more I wanted do it stylized and cartoonish.

I really liked one hand-drawn forest cottage artwork, so I picked it as a base to build around and started sketching. I can't imagine jumping straight into 3D and start bashing things together.

Well, I can. But with limited time on my hands I find it a bit risky. I would rather invest more time in preparations and be ready to go in with a clear picture in my head. And on paper.

Even if you can't sketch too good, paper will show you what works and what breaks. If there's actually enough space in the bottle to create everything you wanted without making it super small and unreadable.

Turns out I couldn't. I had to reduce the scope quite a lot, until I saw a composition that made sense for the bottle scale.

You can watch the process video on Youtube.