For colouring the characters, I wanted from the start to use a photo of a real towel, or somehow recreate that texture, and I eventually found out how to import a texture into the colour panel on Toon Boom. So I imported this photo, having changed the original hue of it in Photoshop:

I found that it worked for the paint bucket in the areas that the paint bucket was willing to work, but when I tried to apply it with the brush in the areas that the paint bucket refused to do, it came out all pixilated, like the image was too big and I couldn’t make it smaller. So I gave up and did this:

BUT THEN, I decided to try and again and found that while the paint bucket sometimes couldn’t fill in empty areas, it could fill in areas that I had hand-coloured with the a plain colour. Which ended up like this:

The main issue hear is that the texture is inconsistent. If I’ve coloured an area by hand with the brush, the paint bucket applies the texture to each brush stroke separately:

However, I decided to keep this. It means the characters will have a boil in their colour/texture as well as for their lines, so shouldn’t look too strange. It also creates more of a surrealness to it – that the towel texture is jittering and changing as it moves, while the the paper background is still. Even the places where the paint bucket did fill in the whole area are still inconsistent, because of the the way it repeats the image. The weirdness of it makes sense for this piece, since it is literally two towels talking to each other.

Adding another photographic element adds to the collage effect created by the background. I like that this “real” imagery contrasts with the obviously drawn outlines and faces of the characters. But the digital drawn and the photographic are still tied together by the roughness of the charcoal pencil tool I used, like a bridge between the the two styles.

Environment Designs

I now have all my backgrounds. Here is the wide shot one, which I did first to help me plan out the space, along with the line template I made to help me construct it:

And here are the angles for the other shots, all made from the original image above:

Some notes made while animating:

Today I’ve been doing inbetweens for when the boy is untwisting and sliding onto the floor at the same time. It involved my most complicated increment arc yet. Here’s how it looked in progress:

Some of the different angles for the “tail” were really hard to figure out, but I almost squealed out loud when I saw the result. He actually looks like he’s doing the thing he’s supposed to do!

I’ve been drawing these blue “increment arcs” (what I’ve been calling them) on a separate layer, where plan out the inbetweens pose-to-pose, starting from the midpoint, then halfway to the midpoint etc. You could also draw them for something moving in a straight line, or any shaped line, but so far I’ve only had animate arcs. It’s kind of like a timing chart in context. Then I draw the lines for the top of the head straight ahead by joining up those points on the arcs, which results in this:

The perspective for the top of the boy’s head changes through this movement, but I don’t have to figure that out because it happens naturally by following the lines on my increment arc. Then I draw the rest of the body by eye. With this method, I’m hoping the movement turns out smooth and consistent without looking too mechanical. Here’s the same thing for the dad:

28th April

Tuesday 30th April

Today I worked on all the inbetweens for the boy leading up to when he falls off the side of the chair. I’ve decided not to do that camera move like Marianna suggested last week, even though it was a good suggestion. I was planning to do this with a smear frame, and got as far as this:

But it was taking so long to figure out and I hadn’t even started to figure out what the boy would look like.

Here is me planning out the boy leaning upwards (he’s got his face down on the chair at first, and is bending backwards):

I then decided to do it as a smear frame, so emphasising him flinging himself upwards in a different way to how he fell backwards beforehand. To do that, I decided to work out what all the frames that the smear frame is replacing look like, and essentially merge them altogether into one outline:

And it’s looking like this:

One of the things I was most trying to do with this who section of the boy was for the character’s movement to match the rhythm of the speech, which I managed to achieve.

First week of animating: Key Frames (and a few inbetweens)

I traced from the drawings I did for the storyboard to create my key frames. There were a few bits where I needed more key frames, specifically the parts where the boy towel twists and untwists himself. I started with the first one, and ended up doing all the inbetweens as well, because it was complicated and I needed to figure out the whole thing in one go for it to work.

It took me a while to get the hang of timing charts. In the photo above, I wrote the numbers on little pieces of paper, so that I could move them around instead of writing them and having to rub them out and write them again if I wanted to change it. I also tried making my timing charts really long so there would be more of a difference between the sizes of gaps.

Next I did the key frames for when the boy falls off the side of the chair and is untwisting while sliding off the chair at the same time, which is even more complicated. The only way I can keep a hold of how I’m planning to do any of it is by making notes like this.

Plus: New version of x-sheet, page 1, to start adding faces