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