The Tale of Tortoise and Monkey

Rather than creating all new paintings, my approach was to take single frames from already-animated footage that I felt best represented a particular scene. The goal was to figure out how to best adjust the color scheme of each character according to the scene’s lighting conditions while getting an idea of how the final film might look.

Let’s start with Scene 3. I’m including the original screen from Toon Boom Studio for reference. If you’ve seen the line tests before, it’s kind of a shock to see them put into context:

I had originally wanted the characters to look overexposed and contrasty like the environments here, but lightening Turtle any more here makes him the same color as the ground.

On to Scene 4. Here’s the first part of the scene:

After doing some research, it came as kind of relief to learn that tail-less monkeys exist in Southeast Asia. I’m still mulling over whether to include the tail. It could potentially be a nice way of accentuating Monkey’s emotions. It could also be a pain to animate. Anyway,  the latter part of the scene:

None of this is final, by the way. I’m thinking of testing out some simpler environments and color schemes before I’m done, but I’d love to get some opinions. What works or doesn’t work?

Update:

I received a few comments about a lack of clear focal points in some of the previously posted art. It was something that I noticed too as I was working on them. The area where I saw the biggest problem was in the bamboo spikes, which tend to blend into the grass. I tried to remedy this by placing a transparent “haze” layer over the background elements to dull them, and outlines around the spikes themselves. While that works up close, take a few steps back and it’s all just kind of a pond of green. Here are few revisions after taking some of the suggestions into account:

A little more than a year-and-a-half into production, I’m finally getting around to this stage of visual development. In most cases, figuring out the look of the environment and color studies/scripts probably would have been done to a certain degree by this stage in production. My excuse? A year ago, I didn’t even know how to paint. I’m focusing right now on the environment for scenes 3 & 4. About 60 – 70% of the film takes place in this location. I figured that it’s probably a good idea to try to settle on something here.

My first attempt was with Corel Painter X’s digital watercolor tools, hoping that I’d get something similar to what you see in Disney’s The Jungle Book:

Peep that broccoli shaped bamboo!

Yeah … let’s pretend that the previous picture doesn’t exist. I moved to Painter’s ‘oil’ tools for the subsequent paintings. Here’s another take on Scene 3:

Scene 3 - normal daylight

Better … it’s simple and I think it conveys humidity fairly well. But if you look at the last line test I posted (2-03, which takes place at around this time of day), the characters appear hungry and worn down. Perhaps the environment should look antagonizing as well:

The heat ... it burnssss me

Scene 4 takes place several hours later, just as the sun is beginning to set:

Nothing refreshes like bamboo spikes in the late afternoon ...

… and the latter part of Scene 4 takes place at dusk. Keep in mind that I don’t know quite know what I’m doing, which is why I had to do it thrice.

First attempt ... perhaps a little too yellow and muddy?

Second attempt - cooler shadows. I think the contrast is better here.

Third attempt - slight adjustment to the "haze" layer I've got covering the background.

The next step is to get the characters into the scene to see how they mesh with the environment and to settle on their corresponding color schemes. I get the feeling that I haven’t quite reached the final designs yet.