Breaking up emu chick

Today I made the broken up emu chick in Photoshop and also added the emus to my colour palette.

Breaking up emu

Today I spent gathering reference images of emus and recreating my emu in Photoshop broken up in layers. Here it is beside the two characters.

Breaking up girl/boy front

Today I finished breaking up the front view of both my boy and girl characters. This included adding shadows and working on a colour palette.

Breaking up boy front

This morning I started breaking up the boy character. I have so far done the head. I copied elements from the girl and resized them to speed things up a bit. The eyes were especially a timing-saving and accurate way of fixing up the eyes because they are so detailed, which its shading. All I had to do for that was resize and remove the prominent eyelashes and then change the hue/saturation/lightness (mostly hue) to change the eyes from green to blue, this was a very effective method.

Placing characters in bg colours schemes

This morning I decided to copy the characters over onto the three bg colour schemes that I painted, to make sure that they worked well with the style of background.

The third background is by far the best of the three.

This first image the background is too messy and rough, it just doesn't have the right feel.


The second background, because of the darkground the girl starts to get lost in the background, blending in, it just doesn't contrast enough.


The third background feels lighter than the other two, and neater, and the characters stand out, but don't look out of place.


I've come to the conclusion, just based off these samples, that these traditionally painted backgrounds do work well even with the digitally painted characters. The background doesn't have to be painted perfectly to work but it can't be too rough. The characters need to contrast with the background just enough for them to stand out but not enough for them to look out of place.

Animatic 08

For this version of the animatic the changes involved the boy jumping at the bag. I played around with the timing, speeding it up a bit and reducing the movement to improve the feel. I also made the end scene last slightly longer so it fades completely to black.

Animatic 07

Last night I also made a few changes, I made the emu chick move into the frame when it first appears. I also changed the climbing the tree scene, so we don't see the girl climb into the tree and the emu races up to the boy as he's climbing, I also shortened the scene since there wouldn't be as much animation needed to be done within the frame to take up that time.