03 // Early Experiments and Workflow Tests

When it came to gathering a collection of work and experiments that I'd made in this style, I remembered that as far back as HND1 Computer Arts in 2012 I'd attempted something similar with a digital painting, where I used various layers of mist to fade and reveal the character beneath. Here's the clip:

It's an even simpler version of what I'm working on just now, as it doesn't take into account the need for understanding how layers will react in accordance with a camera motion, instead I just used a simple zoom and fade effect to get the look I was after. The techniques I used were similar enough I think: having the digital painting arranged in separate layers of depth, imported into After Effects, applied to 3D space and animated accordingly over time. At least I think that's how I did it. I might have actually skipped the 3D-space part and just animated scale and opacity changes.

It was interesting to watch that clip again - I'd almost forgotten all about it. Now it seems as I've come full circle and am revisiting the technique, this time with new skills and ambitions.

Since then, my illustration style has changed a bit: my art style has become a little more simplified and graphic.

Arriving at my Current Art Style

I now use a cel-shaded, comic-book style. It feels much more comfortable for me to produce this style of artwork, and as such I find my speed increasing as I become more confident with it, which has in turn allowed me to spend a little more time studying some of the fundamentals I might have given less attention to in the past. Things such as composition, depth, perspective, draughtmanship, colour theory, anatomy etc... I now have more time to try and get these skills up to scratch.

Here are a few examples of more recent work where I've been gradually getting to grips with, and trying to develop my personal art style:

Establishing a Workflow

I'll talk a little bit about the animation project I've currently been working on, which is serving as my introduction to parallax-style animation workflows.

When I began thinking about the techniques required for these animations, I recalled a tutorial clip I'd seen ages before, which gave some workflow advice. I searched it out and gave it a couple of views to see if I could pick up any new techniques.

This was the only tutorial I'd really seen on the subject, but it was concise enough that after watching it I was able to look back at all the other cutscene clips I'd collected previously, and have a good idea of how they were made.

My next step was to conduct a few experiments of my own, to see what limitations there might be, and how some of my own finished artwork might translate to the style.

I chose 4 of my own pieces and set about assembling them into the necessary components, ready to animate.Since I tend to keep hold of the PSD files for illustration work that I produce, it was easy enough to revisit these and figure out what had to be done from there.

I knew that each image had to be arranged in terms of BG, MG, Character, FG and FX elements, with multiples of each adding to the parallax effect. For each image I separated and merged layers as necessary until I had the main elements as I needed them. These GIFs give an idea of how the layering process looked for each image:

I was able to take these files straight into After Effects and play around with them a little to try and get the parallax effect. It felt like quite aan intuitive process, and I was able to get some decent results straight off the bat, so I won't go into too much detail regarding it here. Later on though, as my methods become a little more complex, I'll go into more detail about the techniques.

Here's a screen-grab of one of the files within AE, which should give an indication of how I was going about it: