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:

Shot 3-09 line test

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: