Real Eyes Realize Real. . .Leaves

Hi everyone!

This weeks calls for exclamation marks because, at long last, I am finally able to see what I’m drawing. I lost my glasses in October of last year, and now, five months later, I’ve just put my new pair on my face. It’s great to be reassured that trees aren’t actually fuzzy blobs and in fact have leaves.

Speaking of trees—very subtle segue there—there’s going to be a lot of them in my animation, since it largely takes place in a forest. I spent this afternoon doodling trees, and while I think the airy, willowy ones will ultimately work best, I much prefer to draw lumpier designs like the one pictured here in the top right corner:

As you can see at the bottom left corner, my bird designs are becoming alarmingly similar to Angry Birds

Maybe I’ll find a way to slip a few of the chunkier ones in.

All of these trees are going to be populating my backgrounds. For the most part I want to stick to flat planes of color in the background, because that’s how the characters are going to look and I don’t want visual dissonance between the two. This is also how I’ve done backgrounds in all my previous animations, and I’m going to carry the method through to this current project. 

One problem that has come up in nearly all of the backgrounds I’ve drawn is a lack of attention to staging. I find myself forgetting that I need to create space for the characters to stand and move on, even as I reference my color script as a guide. I think the root of this issue is that I haven’t made a sketch layer in Photoshop for any of the images, a blueprint where I lay all the parts out before I color anything. Doing so would force me to pay attention to the specifications of my color script and put thought into setting up scenes. Instead, I’ve been jumping right into the final product and put down color immediately.

For some reason, many of the Photoshop brushes look like they're lagging when I use them

Although that may seem like a difficult way to work, it’s very easy to edit color as I go. Photoshop offers not only the standard “paint bucket tool,” which fills an area with a solid color, but also a color balance adjustment tool that allows all of the colors to be changed simultaneously. Here is a demonstration of how I can view a sketch in multiple different palettes:

Moving forward, I want to refine my backgrounds and finish the ones necessary for the first scenes so that I can turn my rough draft animation from last week into a final version. Hopefully now that I can see what I’m doing, detail work will be easier. 

See you next week!

Hark! An Animation

Hi everyone,

This week I finally began to actually animate—just a few dozen frames of the opening scene, but still more than I expected to have done at this point. I’ve been reminded all over again of just how many frames are necessary to make motion look smooth and how so much drawing work is condensed into a couple of seconds. This rough draft has 53 frames in 4 seconds and needs intermediates to complete the motion (24—30 fps is typical in professional animation): 

Though drawing frames can be time-consuming, the most tedious aspect for me is putting them all in a timeline, arranging them, and changing their lengths. The longest animation I've ever made had 800 layers and ordering them took a criminally long time. Here's how my current layers stack:

I’m beginning to love Photoshop’s gradient tool, just because it can give so much dimension to a flat shape with very little work on my part. I don’t have a ton of practice with digital art, but I can definitely see the benefits. 

Part of the reason I’ve started to animate earlier than I had planned is my color script. These are typically used by artists to provide an overview of all the visuals in a film; the header image of this blog is in fact part of the color script for Finding Nemo. I really enjoy looking at concept art for animated movies, so I’m fairly familiar with the beautiful, detailed scripts made by Pixar that could almost stand alone as illustrated books. But while I was working on my own script, I realized that I didn’t want to dedicate much time to drawing exactly what I would later recreate in Photoshop. I think one of my main faults as an artist is my distaste for planning, which makes me tend to dive into projects and prevents me from doing many preliminary sketches. It also made me unwilling to put a lot of effort into my sketches only to recreate them all over again.

But the most significant factor in my decision to treat my script as a collection of thumbnails rather than dedicated storyboarding was my materials. I prefer to draw in either ink or oil pastel, and chose to use pastels for the script because they’re fast, easy to smudge, and more vibrant (they're also the usual medium of Pixar color scripts). I needed to draw too many thumbnails to use the expensive pastels I usually reserve for large-scale drawings, but my cheaper pastels did not layer color very well. For these reasons, my color script is a lot more primitive than I imagined it would be when I first began thinking about it in December. Still, it gives me a good blueprint to work off. Here are the first two pages:

You can see how the first page is similar to the animation

And there you have it; that's where I'm at right now. I’m continuing to experiment with background painting, and I want to pin that down as I continue into next week. I really love the style of Steven Universe landscapes, with lots of smooth layered shapes, and will probably somewhat emulate/incorporate that. In addition I'll be making more jumpy practice animations and trying to figure out which texture brushes I like best. 

Until next time,

Rachel

Character and Background Roughs

Hello again everyone!

This week I began to hammer out the basics of my plot and how settings will relate to it. Before I start hemming and hawing over colors, I think I ought to know what exactly I’ll be coloring, which means I’ve spent the last few days sketching my pencil down to a nub. 

First came the characters. I had already decided that my protagonist will be a monster—not that that narrowed my visual options at all. A monster can be anything or anyone, from the bright and cutesy cast of Monsters, Inc. to the dramatic illustrations of Lovecraftian horror to a regular person. If anything, I felt more spoiled for choice after making that decision than before. 

I was able to create many loose potential designs by reminding myself that even if I thought I made a mistake, quirks and jagged lines made the characters more interesting. After all, it’s fairly impossible to draw a monster wrong.

I was partly inspired by an assignment given to fifth and sixth graders by Ms. Hardy, who teaches both lower and upper school art class. Whenever students finished a project early, she asked them to draw a monster. In my months as a teacher’s assistant, I saw dozens of wildly varied drawings: waffle soldiers, three-eyed evil forks, and lots of weird unquantifiable things. The specific, detailed oddities of these sketches had been turning over in the back of my head for most of this year, and when the time came to begin this research project, I was unsurprised to find myself fixated on monsters.

Here are my some of my early character sketches:

Whenever I found myself getting too knotted up in character design, I rerouted and worked on environments instead. Backgrounds are extremely influential on mood, but many people I know seem to overlook their importance. To get my head in the game, I went back to basics and re-watched some of my favorite animated movies, focusing on the background paintings. Sleeping Beauty stood out for its immediately recognizable and illustrative landscape style, but The Land Before Time takes the cake for its deftly framed scenes and careful, beautiful, and precise use of color. That's what I'll be working towards in my own animation.

Now that I have a grasp on the forms and shapes that will be populating my short film, I’m ready to factor in color. In the coming week, my next step will be the creation of a colorscript, which is essentially a colored storyboard that will allow me to see how all of the scenes look together. 

Until then.

Rachel