Background and potential title/credits screen

This was a ruff sketch for a new background - another pan shot in the film. I started by working on one stid of the street and half way through had the idea of making it a wide painting that is fairly symmetrical so that I could have both sides.

I've copied and pasted part of the one half to save time and plan to change it slightly so its not entirely mirrored. I then had this idea of maybe making it a title screen of some sort.

Or like a kind of promo painting aswel as a background for one of my shots.

Tunnel Vision BG

New BG development. I seem to been working a bit quicker now and managed to ruff this out in just a few hours. I had quite a clear idea on the layout so I started with dark colour and added high-lights to define the features of the painting. Its been good this way because I can easily create focus point at will and not spent to much time on unnecessary detail. I'm start to see logic in this method and how it still leaves room for adding detail at the end rather than throughout the painting.

Background updates

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.