Author: thimai

This week I continued animated the third scene of my animation. Unlike the previous ones, which focused on one or two main movements, I want to ramp up the tension by creating a series of quick scenes/movements playing one after another. I think because each part is so short it could be potentially difficult to follow. I will try to work around this by keeping consistent color palettes and have each scene lead into the next one in someway. I primarily try to do this by zooming in/changing angles, but will work to come up with other interesting/creative solutions as I continue animating!

Here is my progress on this scene so far:

Recently I’ve switched from creating digital art on a Wacom tablet on my computer to using an iPad. Though learning the slightly different medium was a bit challenging at first, I found that there were many more tools and shortcuts that made digital art a lot easier than the computer tablet. This week I added the next background to be used in Scene 3 of my animation, as I storyboarded out last semester. Using the lasso tool on Adobe Fresco has made the coloring process much quicker and more convenient. I’ve practiced combining this tool with soft brushes to create gradients, helping shade large areas much faster. Fresco also seems to have more brushes than photoshop, which I have been experimenting with throughout this process. I enjoy sketchier looks, which many textured brushes help achieve.

Here is the next background:

One interesting part about animating my second scene is deciding how I want light and water to interact together. Particularly for this last motion that I’m working on, the water is meant to slide off the characters hand while the light is still embedded underneath their skin. Since this isn’t something we would see in real life, I have the creative liberty to decide what I want this interaction between the two elements to look like. I’ve decided to treat the light like a semi-physical entity, so it melts a bit into the water, but can’t actually be washed away. As I’m working through these scenes, I also feel like my line work and coloring skills are improving, especially with how I’m coloring light/shadow. Here’s my progress from this week!

This week I worked on finishing the hand-washing sequence. This took particularly long to animate just because of the number of moving parts I needed to update in each frame. Though animating the moving water was a bit of challenge for me, I’m really happy with how it turned out. I also drew the next background with I’ll be using for the remainder of the scene. This is the first establishing shot of the scenes after the intro. This is where we are reintroduced to the main character, color palette, and style. I needed to consider how to create a look that I’d be able to replicate for the rest of my animation.

And, here is the remainder of the animated scene from last week!

This week I started the second scene of my animation. I wanted this scene to feel distinctly different from the first one. I thought a contrasting color palette would be a good way to show this. For the first scene I used a dark red color palette to feel ominous and heavy, so I decided to use primarily blues and greys to create an atmosphere of isolation/melancholy in the second scene. In both scenes, I wanted the yellow light to stand out. Not only to emphasis its importance, but also to indicate that it is the same light and the same person in both scenes. When drawing each frame by hand, especially over a long period of time, I find it’s difficult to maintain stylistic continuity. I’ve tried to combat this issue by keeping a list of what brush I use for which lines, and frequently referencing previous frames for consistency in coloring and shading. Below are the first two backdrops I’ve created for the second scene, as well as my entire piece so far: