Details
Here's the behind the scenes art for my short animated scene “And Beyond the End.” which you can see here!
I'm so stoked to be able to show off after about a year of slowly chipping away at this idea.
I'll describe the images in this post from top to bottom.
To begin, here's a look at the very first piece of concept art I did for this scene. This rough idea was sketched out and painted on watercolour paper with poster paints and the silhouette of Ardent walking towards the mountain was drawn on paper and coloured digitally.
The next two images were some test paintings I did to try and capture a starry night sky that I tried to make evocative of galaxies with some slightly unearthly celestial atmosphere.
The third image is a test page to see how well I could even paint a background painting long enough to pan across the screen to help give the illusion of depth.
As I hinted towards in the description of the main post, this was a big project for me and it felt fantastic to push my skills in some challenging ways. These next three images show off the six individual hand painted background paintings I made. I painted all of these separately so that they could all be scanned into my computer and layered overtop of each other at different speeds to give the illusion of depth and perspective in the scene. The fifth image should help show off the fact that, since I wanted this image to be long enough to pan for a decent length of time, I did the base background painting on a sheet of two and a half foot long watercolour paper!
The sixth image shows how each layer was stacked in my animation software. I can't imagine how time consuming doing a scene like this must have been, in the past. This project has been an excellent reminder to be grateful for the technology that I have. I can do, in my home studio, what used to take an entire studio department to accomplish. And speaking of digital compositing!
The seventh image in this set is the pencil line art of Ardent, standing, looking out over the scene. Ardent's body was drawn with pencil on paper but, to help make sure his tail, whiskers, and cape loop smoothly, those elements were animated entirely digitally and composited together in the computer.
Once I had every layer drawn, painted, scanned, edited, animated, and composited, I could move the layers at slightly varying speeds and, ta-DA! That's how this scene came to life!
The final image is a look at the stages this scene went through. From blue pencils, to clean inks with some digital fill colour to help me visualize the scene, to the fully painted and animated final shot!
Doing this scene has given me a tremendously renewed respect for the animation artists of the 90's and 2000's who were walking that line between all traditional and the newest, cutting edge digital tech. If I ever release a collection of animations on DVD or something, I actually animated this scene in 4K resolution, so look out for that in the future, perhaps!
Once again, you can check out the finished art here!
