TVP colouring

After going through the different lining styles, I settled on using the Mechanical Pencil tool drawn with more heavily to keep the definition. With the scene lined, I had to decide a method of colouring.

The character at the top of the blog image is sporting the type of colours that I want to have in the final sequence. I can't word it particularly scientifically, but a lot of deep sea fish and animals have a reddish tint because of the absence of red wavelengths at that depth makes them harder to spot, so much like when a deep sea fish is trawled up into lighter waters, the

Rather than making the creature bright red and looking like a bad case of sun burn, I wanted the extremities to be redder than the rest of him which also makes his hands and feet look injured from the climb.

Being against a painted background (Darrien's work) means the colour of the creature isn't a solid white, so I've picked something slightly darker to build on - the colour, for reference, is R:249 G:247 B:247 and the inside of the mouth is R:53 G:17 B:17.

It is still extremely pale contrasted when against the sky, but most of the ending shots feature the sand which should contrast against the lightness.

Getting a textured look for the shading is something I'm quite set on so the character at least seems to fit into the background painting style. With the initial tests the purple shading meant the character didn't have the red colouring, but the red on its own is too much against the bright blue.

I've settled on mixing the two, using two of the default brushes "blood" and "smoke" to get the textured look, colours being the default red for blood and the shading a combination of purple R:99 G:81 B:112 and a darker R:58 G:57 B:71. Eye shading is R:24 G:238 B:57 and R:241 G:255 B:243 for the highlight and R:43 G:124 B:32 with opacity set to 43% for the shadow.

Here's the mixed version, which seems closer to a bruise in colour which I suppose works in a way. I added a texture on top of "blood" set at 2 opacity to keep the pale areas from standing out too much, and also to reduce the bug eyed look. The texture layer was set at 70% opacity.

 And again with the shading opacity reduced-

I've started work on the TVP animation for the end of the film, and I'm testing some different lining styles. The idea behind doing this in TVP rather than Toon Boom is that the Toon Boom animated segment is meant to make the creature appear quite clean and solid (what with the outline blending into the background), while the section outside the hole is meant to be less striking in terms of colours and outlines, appearing more dream-like, for lack of a better description.

The TVP style of lining is meant to be sketchier- not to the extent of having guide lines and the like show up, but definitely rougher than Toon Boom. I want the lines to have more of an energetic feel to them, although I'm still deciding between having the image redrawn every few frames to have the Rhubarb and Custard level of energy or to have it more subdued.

Below are some of the tests I made of s69-

Of these, it's the finer pencil lines that I prefer. The finer lines allow for more detail without appearing rushed. I think it's between drawing 1 (the dark, thin pencil tool) or number 5 (mechanical pencil) although I think number 1 probably works better because of the definition. The character will be stood on a light coloured background, so he still needs to be visible.

Colouring tests will be made shortly.