Drawing style tests

The following are little rotoscoping tests I've done from some photo sequences. I tried out plain pencil lineart, lineart plus paint colour and coloured sketches.

Photoshop

I do most of my animation in photoshop using a drawing tablet and for this project I was able to find some traditional media brushes for photoshop. These brushes mimic real life drawing tools. Using these will cut down on time spent scanning frames of animation.
Here's a link to some traditional media brushes for photoshop. The brushes range from graphite pencils, pastels, charcoal and paint.
http://cedrichohnstadt.wordpress.com/2008/01/22/photoshop-pencil-brushes/




This is a picture using the pencil brush tool, there are a number of different pencil brushes which create different pencil effects.

I used the pencil brush for the lineart in this picture and used a paint brush to vaguely draw up the background for it.

The cutout filter is used in this picture, there are a number of filters on photoshop which create different effects on photographs, which can save time during animation.




I used the same method of the second picture on this one, the outline is done with the pencil brush with the colour painted behind. The background is a photograph which is posterized.

Background photos

This is part of my setting research, I went through the countryside around my house and collected photography of possible backgrounds for my animation. I made sure to revist places that I hadn't seen since childhood.

Brainstorming and Themes

I've been keeping a concept diary for this project, recording different ideas and sketches for the animation.

These are some scans from my diary. I started with some brain-storming of subjects which I enjoy and came up with different project idea's, listing the different options within them and seeing whether or not different parts could link together. I decided that I would go with the memories idea and from that I came up with childhood memories.

The next part was exploring the theme, and what aspects of childhood I should concentrate on, such as memories, dreams, fantasy, growing up, etc. I looked up the meaning of each theme, what might be associated with it, and looked through different books to research them.

From the fantasy theme, I listed different stories that I had read as a child and wrote down bullet points of different aspects of them which I remembered. One story was separated with colour which led me to think that I could separate scenes with something in between linking them together which would allow me to use random sequences of memories.

These are some sketches of different settings and objects I was thinking could link the scenes together. The one I decided would work best was the locket, since they are used too keep treasured memories.