Painting Cars

Been gathering reference of cars for my background - these are the kind of cars I'm looking for. The difficult thing now is going to be ensuring that they're painted in perspective. I've been ruffing them out first to get the right angle and scale.

Bare Street Painting

It's taken much longer than anticipate to get to this stage, long than I would like to admit! But I'm quite please with the look and just need to add cars to the painting so the street doesn't look so bare. I plan to use older cars, the kind that would have been around more when I was younger. This will only be a subtle feature but it's important to me never the less.

Long Pan Painting 2

This background is another long pan shot and its proving to be hard work. The perspective in the animatic layout was never that good to begin with and so it's hardly been a decent guide to follow for actual painting.

 I've more or less roughed out a layout now though and now need to add layers of trees and bushes. The plan is that I will use some of the tree layers to create a kind of parallax within the pan to help create a bit of depth to the paintings. I'm a little conflicted at the moment though as I don't know wether to include line work in these paintings. I'm thinking of either have line work for  just the animation and not the background art or have line work for the animation and for the foreground artwork like trees to help compliment the line work of the animation.

 However, as this painting develops its starting to look like a clash of ideas so I think I'm going to just go with line art just for the animated character instead.

Animatic and layouts

 Been reworking my animatic quite hard recently, revisiting some of the shots and working out long pans. I've decided that I'm going to follow them quite closely to create my background designs so that it is less work when it comes to it and I don't have to spend to much time working out the layout.

 Here you can see that I've started working straight on top of an animatic screen shot in photoshop to paint the scene.

It seems to be working quite well and I'm  only making minor changes to the layout so that it reads better. This is probably going to be one of the largest painting of the film. The way I see it is, If I have large background paintings for the film then I won't have to animate as much and I can fill the script with some nice visuals too. I've definite got my work cut out - painting is quite a slow process but I'm hoping to get quicker at it.

New angles

New take on the designs - I've been breaking down my characters into basic shapes to see if I can make the very distinguishable from each other whilst still maintaining the fact that they are brothers.

  

This is nearly there but Ben looks like a bit of a star fish at times.  My loose line work follows the guides a bit to strictly and I think I want to meet these designs half way.  I want to be able to draw these guys intuitively and doing these break downs is helping me get there.

I'm also considering volumes more now, which will also help with consistency.  They're jaw lines are different now too and is helping them look less similar.

Spot the difference

These are some character expression sketch sheets that I've been reviewing. I thought I was getting a bit better at drawing their hair and was starting to simply the forms. I showed my class mate Mahmoud and he has suggested breaking down the hair into basic forms to give it a rule to bare in my when drawing. 

He was also surprised to hear me say that they were different characters - He said he thought they both looked too alike and that I should work on the design some more. It's true though, right now the only major difference in their appearances is their hair.

Mahmoud has been telling me about how he use to draw Aladdin from the Disney film for fun and said that his hair had a basic silhouette.

 With this in mind I'm going to try and really finalise the look of these guys now

Bad Hair Day

Been recently spending a lot of time refining and developing character designs for Ben and George. After being told that my characters look a little bit too old i've been trying to simplify their features and remove any lines that might be aging the  characters. 

I've started squashing the features by bringing the chin and mouth up more, this seems to be helping to define their ages. I'm also trying to simplify the way they're drawn so that they are easier to draw and are not too overly detailed for animation and to animate.  

I'm also having trouble drawing the hair of the characters consistently, it seems to always look different and it's becoming a problem.

David Colman

I found this Artist  by chance, his name is David Colman. He is renowned for his dynamic and expressive animal character designs in traditional mediums such as pencil, pastels and pen. I love his style and the way he presents his work - it has such a professional look. 

I decided to look into him a bit more and I found an interesting in depth interview with Colman that describes how his background, influences and style of working. Really interesting read.

interview - http://david-colman-interview.blogspot.co.uk/

Artist website - http://www.davidsdoodles.com/

Animatic First Full Cut

This is the first full cut of the animatic, which has been a lot of work to get to. I'm pleased with it but understand that it needs revising. After I have a group critique I've realised that the scrip is really wordy and being that the animation is over 3 minutes it should be cut down where possible. Also some of my shots don't hook up too well and need seeing to. Overall though, this is a big mile stone for me.

Story boarding and animatic development

Been flat out with this recently - trying to visualise the whole film and get it to read is one difficult task. I've been planning potential pan shots to help with the narrative. I was working in Digicel Flipbook at first to story borad as I like drawing with bitmap rather than with vector line work as its better to sketch with.  But have switched to story board pro for it panning features. Its just easier to work with and I just want to get it down right now and stop being so fussy. 

I've been revisiting me concept painting too, trying out potential pan shots. I sketched the bottom of this in yellow by coincidence but actually quite liked the way it looked so I continued it in more detail.

my animatic is becoming quite detailed but its really helping me imagine the overall look for the film. Plus with never really worked on backgrounds with this much detail before so I'm kind of exploring my abilities at the same time. I should save it for the actually backgrounds themselves but I'm now starting to think I can really base them on the animatic layouts if need be. In some case I will need to for the sake of the time of the pan shots.

 I rough them out quite loosely first and then layer more detail as the image and my intent becomes clearer. I make it sound like I'm making it up as I go along!