Sunday, September 15, 2013

Through the Woods WIP


A few months ago I did a loose little doodle that I was quite happy with, and I'm finally getting around to giving a proper going over. I'm looking to capture the approach of some of my day-job stuff and mix it with my own colour palettes and little flourishes, so this is a bit experimental.

I usually fine line my character work, but looking through my personal environment work I seem to stick to splodges of colour and refining as I go. As a technique I love that approach- changes are instantaneous and nothing is ever locked down, right up until the final save. In animation production, however, lines get signed off on first so everything has to be thought out and placed first.

There are definitely benefits to this approach; once you finish the linework it's exactly like a comics workflow in many respects. I've worked out some quick ways to flat out pages in colour, and they all apply in situations like this.
Also, with everything planned you can line out seperate planes for easier rendering later on. This doesn't help *that* much for me because if I'm being clean, I always refer to my flats for selections anyway. If I do go lineless later on, it'll still stand to me. Similarly, line holds are much easier to manage.

The biggest disadvantage is it drawing a line in the sand in terms of design. About 3/4 of the way through doing those trees (all the background, and half of the foreground) I thought 'what if they were all curled and gnarled, and the stones were taller so it draws the eye more'...not much use to me after an hour or two of inking.Were I just splodging along in paint I'd have painted straight over, but my hands were tied unless I wanted to draw a whole lot of trees all over again.

So for finished designs, yay it's a win, but for evolving designs on the page it's an absolute killer.

I'll update again with this as I go, and it should be interesting to see how the rendering process will be affected. Fingers crossed!

-C

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