June 30, 2012

Evolution of a Background

The third Fester Fish short, which will probably be titled "Fester Makes Friends," is still a few weeks away from completion, but I did promise to post some work from it at some point.

So here's a little step-by-step run-through of how I've been doing the backgrounds for this cartoon... First I do a loose sketch of the scene, sometimes just using the storyboard panel directly.



Then I do a loose color guide in Flash. I didn't do any color guides until this latest cartoon. Before, I would just draw the background and then mess around in Photoshop until I found some color scheme that I liked, but now I'm planning them more carefully in Flash while I can see how the characters fit into them, so that they stand out as much as possible. Although it's an extra step, it ends up taking less time in the long run because I don't have to make as many changes afterwards.


Then I draw the clean linework, and export that from Flash.



Finally I open up Photoshop, paint in all the flat colors from the guide and then start adding gradation, textures and sometimes highlights and shadows if I'm feeling saucy.


Look out for this and many other equally exciting backgrounds in the next Fester Fish cartoon coming soon. You goan love it mo den waffles. And ah KNOW you loves you some waffles.

2 comments:

Zoran Taylor said...

HOLY SHIT!!! That background is AMAZING!! It looks completely different from anything in the first two FFs or your earlier stuff. Both this BG and the new site banner have a distincly Joe Murray fravour to them. Also, fromthe looks of the BG, you've got some Tashlin-level depth-of-field experimentation up your sleeve this time. Now I REALLY can't wait to see this thing.....

Mark Kjærgaard said...

Hey Aaron.
Cool BG here, and nice with a walk through of the work process as well.
Thanks for the kind words on my blog, it's really nice to know that you like it.