Guidelines about your Final backgrounds

Hey, just some guidelines on background construction to refresh Henning's presentation last week.

Here's the talented background designer Bradley Gake. Look how he designs the first rough with very bold lines, creating a striking composition, then digitally colors it in black and white to get the light and shadows in place, only then he finalises with the final colors. This process can be done in Illustrator, but Photoshop can also be used.





Look how the perspective and viewpoints are correct but he has designed the buildings playing with scale and stretched them to get this amazing retro future look.
Also Bradley Gake, not a parallel line in sight!!, and the donut is especially for Michiel :) .
He also draws directly in Flash, by putting your drawing on a separate layer you can achieve pretty interesting results, and your file size remains very small.


Designs from Robert C Valley,

Amazing futuristic bg for the animated series 'Samurai Jack', one of my all time favorites.
If you learn to stylize your architecture, it will help you play with geometrical forms and push your design to the next level....
Think how your action is taking place and plan your sequence to see what needs to be made and what you don't have to design, it saves you a lot of unnecessary work, this is my bg for Kika & Bob

Guidelines for your final Character designs

Ok, I am posting a few pics as Guideline for your final Character designs: basically you should look in your character and design the main poses that you will use in your animation: this model sheet is courtesy of pcweenies.com , don't focus on the style but I would advise you to study how these characters are made, use your architectonic knowledge of volumes, cylinders, circles, etc to make your basic character shapes.

We would like to see a 'turn around', that is your character in front view, 3/4, side, and back.
There is a reason to keep it simple:
These are just examples, if you decide to be more realistic is fine, the same rules apply!!

Courtesy Fan Boy and Chum


This sheet is part of the Kika & Bob animation series I have worked on and it was designed by Bobbypola

Foster's home for imaginary friends

Reference is important: don't just draw your characters, it is much more effective if you research your character, is he/she good or evil, friendly or aggressive, what are the main features? Study photographs, famous people or people you know can be a good source of inspiration. We are not trying to make a caricature, we want to convey as much 'essence' of the character as possible with least amount of work!