There are a lot of episodes of Rick and Morty coming down the pipeline, but actually getting the 70 episodes Cartoon Network owes the fans might take some time. That’s why it’s great that Adult Swim released an instructional video giving fans a look at the right and wrong ways to draw the show’s titular characters.
Rick and Morty art director Jeffrey Thompson leads the demonstration, and he gave the fans the best piece of advice for trying to perfect the show’s signature look: make the eyes weird.
“Sometimes you’re doing a character design and it looks a little to normal to live in the Rick and Morty universe. And one way that you can immediately solve this is by taking an eyeball and lifting it off to the side,” Thompson said. “It helps it look like a sketch that Justin Roiland would have just completed.”
There are a lot of rules for drawing Morty: don’t draw his hair past his ear. Morty’s ears, by the way, start right where his eyes end.
“The lip-to-chin ratio is very important,” Thompson said. “You put it too low, who’s that guy? But if you put it here, there he is… there’s our guy.”
And then there’s that high school boy’s dump truck, which is nonexistent.
“Hate to break it to you ladies: Morty doesn’t have a butt,” Thompson said, eying the camera directly.
The video also takes you through how to draw Rick, whose head is pill-shaped before he gets lots of hair added after the fact. There are also a lot of different rules about his nose and eyebrows. Thompson made a joke about having to fire a designer who drew Rick with not one, but three eyebrows. It’s unclear if he’s actually joking, but if that job is available, they’ll have a lot of candidates for artists after watching this video.
