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!