The Tale of Tortoise and Monkey

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.