Happy new year! This past week and a half has been very productive for my project.
First, I remembered to color both of the character turnarounds for the characters I’m using:
I went through a few phases on what I wanted the astronaut’s colors to be, but eventually I settled on an orangey yellow with hints of orange (such as on his bowtie). What made me choose this was the lesson on character and environments, where we discussed color theory: yellow is used to convey innocence and life, while orange is upbeat and “nice” overall. The astronaut is not a very smart character, but I made him to be a nice person, so the colors reflected that nicely, and I decided to use them in his design. As for the white, I considered that most of the animation is set in space, which is often depicted as black or a very dark shade of blue. Therefore, a predominantly white character with splashes of yellow-orange would immediately be noticed on a screen with otherwise darker colors, and since he’s the main character, that’s exactly what I want.
I chose the aliens’ colors after the astronaut, so I based them off of him. Purple is yellow’s complementary color, so they would contrast nicely against the astronaut’s yellow-ish tones. And again, I used the lesson on color theory to solidify this choice: shades of pink and purple are often used for otherworldly and “magical” settings and characters. Aliens are, in the most literal sense of the world, otherworldly! Therefore, I gave one alien a pure purple tint, and a pinkish purple to the other, just to slightly distinguish between the two of them.
I also remembered to make a character sheet for the aliens; general details on their design, colors, and lack of facial expression.
After that was done, I went to make the official boards: in the end, I made 40 panels, two of which are panning shots (one horizontally and one vertically). Below you can see my original concept sketch for the horizontal panning shot.
I decided to draw the official boards in an 8cm by 4.5cm ratio; it’s a 16×9 ratio, which was recommended by Joe, and it was big enough to put in a good amount of detail while still being small enough to not have me take too long for every single panel.
I drew the boards with a very light pencil. After that, I inked all the boards, starting with the characters and ending with the backgrounds. I then erased the pencil, and colored everything in (again, starting with the characters and ending with the backgrounds). Below, you can see one of the 5 pages containing the final boards.
I really enjoyed making the lineart: drawing with ink can be stressful, as it can’t be erased (which became more and more apparent to me with each tiny mistake I wished I could delete), but it was also therapeutic, in a way; like connect-a-dot puzzles. I was just going over lines I’d already done, so as long as I stayed focused, I couldn’t do much harm.
Coloring was a different story; as mentioned in the last entry, I’m not used to coloring all my drawings, and I think it shows in some cases here. I wanted to give the sky tints of blue and purple, but I believe it ended up looking messy in many instances, even after I practiced on a separate sheet of paper. In the future, I’ll look to experiment with other types of coloring, to make sure it looks less messy.
Tomorrow, I’ll try scanning in all of the drawings and editing them together. It should be easy enough; if it ends up being longer than 40 seconds, I’ll try cutting a few panels to save time, but I think it’ll be fine. As for the sound, I’ve already identified a few objects around the house to make some sound effects (I’m planning on using an old Tamagotchi for a beeping noise!).
The hand-in date is in a week, but I’m feeling confident. A few messy panels aside, I think I’m doing a good piece of work. All I can hope for is that everyone else thinks so too.