Playground Scene Concept Art

This week we were given the brief for our motion studies project, an 8-second sequence wherein we have to animate children playing on playground equipment. This entailed creating character designs, designing an easy art style to animate quickly with, and drawing up a sequence of thumbnails and a layout of the environment.

I wanted each character to be colourful and unique, so I worked hard to create individual colour palettes for each character. When I had drawn all of them, I did a line up of both the boys and the girls. This was fun as I don't normally draw children, and it was interesting creating different personalities for them that showed through their outfits, hairstyles and attitudes.

Next came the layout design. I practiced drawing playground equipment using reference I found online, before creating a simple playground scene. I didn't want the viewer to be distracted by the background since the movement of the characters is the focus of the piece, so I made the background very simple, surrounded by cloud-like bushes to allude to the playground being in some kind of clearing.

Finally, the thumbnails. Originally I had been confused by the brief and mistakenly believed that the animation would be a minute long, so I began developing a narrative. However, this had to be simplified in order to fit into an 8-second slot, so the original story (a shy boy coming to the park and the other children dragging him onto different equipment to try it out) was cut short. Instead, I focused on a bully character fighting this boy instead, and the other kids leaving their games to attempt to pull the two boys apart. While I was told this would be a complex piece of animation to produce, I am willing to try it and prove that I understand the way the body moves well enough to construct a convincing fight scene. It will also be a chance to try something new as it is something I haven't tried to do before.

3D Environment

I completed my 3D environment. I had trouble with modelling initially and it took me a while to understand UV mapping, but once I had practiced, I was successful in creating an environment. I ran into trouble with UV mapping when I used a texture that wasn't compatible with Renderman to texture with, but fortunately once I had already mapped I didn't need to redo anything, other than changing the texture to a Pixar surface texture. I didn't paint any of the textures myself but I did manipulate a lot of them in Adobe Photoshop in order for their hue, saturation, brightness and contrast to be compatible with the rest of the background. I feel that this turned out pretty well considering that 3D is a weak point of mine.

Joyride Concept Artwork - 1

Another side project set in the same universe as my witch university is Joyride, a one-shot comic I'm developing featuring Veronika, a joyriding witch who traverses the badlands on her trusty broomstick, and Romy, a shy solitary witch who just wants to get by safely in an otherwise unsafe town.

Veronika is your typical bad girl, who fell in with the 'bad' crowd in her adolescence and chose to embrace the bad reputation her poverty gave her, pretending she doesn't care to hide just how much she does. She's a flirty type who loves to tease squares. She also loves the open sky, and flying is her one true passion.

Romy is a quiet, polite girl. As a solitary witch, she learned magic from connecting with her past life rather than from studying, and for that reason she has no friends. She lives with an older sister in the badlands, and is an easy target due to how weak and defenceless she appears. However, she has powerful magic that sometimes bursts out uncontrollably. She is also terrified of flying, which is all the more reason for Veronika to take her for a spin.

Two girls riding the same broom isn't exactly an easy thing to draw, so it took me a few times to practice. Somewhere in the process, I created a more unique shape for the end of Veronika's broom.

Here is a possible front cover for Joyride. Veronika and Romy are in mid flight, with Romy staring down at the world below in a combination of fear and fascination, while Veronika is secretly pleased to be giving her new companion a good show. I didn't include patterns on their clothing as I am unsure whether or not the brushes I downloaded originally are free for commercial use, as I plan to upload this to Tapastic once I've completed it.

I like the flat, bubbly style so far, and don't feel it needs to have a great amount of shading as the look I'm going for is a simple, fun comic with a youthful feeling to it.

Interior Background

One of the extra tasks for the 2D environment was to paint an interior background, featuring a source of natural light and a source of artificial light. For this I painted a simple bedroom scene, with a window for my natural light source and a lamp for my artificial light source. I tried using a complimentary colour scheme, and used cool yellow and blue tones for the natural light and a warm golden tone for the artificial light to contrast the two.