Well hello! In the last post I talked a bit about storyboarding and showed you all my rough animatic of Some Days Are Bug Days.  After getting an idea of the rhythm and flow of the animation through the animatic, I was raring to get going on background designs and especially the textures.

As always, the first step was to do some initial sketches in the ole sketchbook. Below is a photo of some of the rough sketches for the Bugway clock and cars.

Once I had an idea of what I wanted to do through some rough sketches, I moved on to Illustrator to create the line work and get an idea of the coloring I wanted.

Next I got to work on what I was really excited to experiment with … the textures. From the initial idea of this animation, I had a thought of what I wanted to try with the creation of the textures. This animation is a nature based world, so I wanted to try to implement some real world texturing that had some variation of color and light.

I went out and bought all sorts of tissue paper, from the cheap kinds that you stuff your gift bags with to a few higher end tissue papers bought at the local art store. I would then tear the various tissue papers into smaller pieces, crumple those up and paste them onto some cheap white poster board, layering them over each other. After they dried, I would go outside, hold them up to the sunlight and take a picture with my camera phone (I didn’t have a nice camera at the time).

I would bring those photos into Photoshop where I did some layering of the different photos and color correction to get the desired texture I wanted. Below is a progression of the leaf texture building up in Photoshop.

Now it came to time to put these elements, the Illustrator line and color work and the textures, together into one design using Photoshop. Below are those more finalized background designs.

Thank you for taking a look at this post. This was one of my favorite parts of this animation’s process and I hope I was able to show you a bit of how it came about.

If you would like to purchase a canvas print of a couple of the background designs you can do that here.

Coming up in the next post on the animation process for Some Days Are Bug Days I’ll talk a bit about the character design of Junebug and rigging the character in Toon Boom Harmony. If you have any questions feel free to comment here or send me an email through the contact form on the right.

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