Olivia Background Progress

For my Olivia Animation background 

This was my original rough draft concept:

The i took my draft and cleaned it up, I found the wall especially, lacked depth, so to all the objects and planks I added highlights and shadows.

After I had done this I got some feedback from my teacher and some students saying that we couldn't see that the door was actually a door, Therefore i decided to add some angles to the door and also tried to give my background a bit more texture. 

As this was my first real painting with Photoshop, I found it quite hard to get the highlights and shadows correct especially on the glass, I was worried that I would have to paint Olivia's reflection on it. I looked up a lot of tutorials on how to draw different materials. 

I wasnt happy with this background, The light was a pain to get right and the shadows near the light were also a nightmare. So i decided to start painting again.

This is a progress picture of my painting before it reached its final stage. I was intent on having a lot of texture and to make it look less like it was out of a cartoon. My teacher told me i had to be more careful especially with metal and how you draw it (the door knob) because the lines had to be extremely straight. I looked up metal door knobs and tried to understand how the highlights and shadows worked so that i could apply it to my painting. 

This is my final background. It took me a long long time to draw the wood and i felt like giving up because looking at it close up all day made me think it didn't even look like wood anymore. But i continued and ended up with a kind of wood looking texture. I enjoyed painting the candles most of all.  

Olivia Thumbnail Sketches

For Olivia's transformation, I wanted it to look like a watercolour effect, or a 'when pigment mixes with colour effect" :


The background {see previous post}, I want it to be fairly simple so as to not take the attention away from Olivia, but also not too simple because I still want the viewer to realise and see she is in a room. It also has to be dull and faint as the only light source in the room is coming from the Keyhole man.

I looked up some gifs and images for reactions. I imagined she would be shocked or surprised :



I also hesitated between making her looked surprised and making her look "Stunned"?

Olivia Background Concept

This is what I have been working on for the Olivia animation background. I tried to play with lighting effects on photoshop. This is my first try for the draft just to see where everything would be and how all the objects would work together [Keeping in mind the rule of thirds] Most of the room you don't see but I still wanted it to seem as real as possible and wasn't going to leave just one side of the room blank. I will have to work on the shading as well as my line work. For the background I wanted it to  look eerie therefore have fewer objects in the room.

Olivia Research

So for this assignment, I have to study a character called Olivia. She is a shy, depressed girl in her twenties, abused by her partner. Because of this, I have decided to make the theme of the story very gloomy and sad. She transforms when she steps out of a keyhole. This, I think, (Although I am not sure) signifies her death. Her escaping the hardships of life and becoming a more confident person because after all when you die you don't have any more worries. The keyhole man nags her along her journey telling her to come with him and escape her relationship. The story is in black and white leading up to her transformation when she then turns to colour. I want her to hesitate as she gets out of the door but then turns back and realises that she's doing what's best for her. I have not yet decided what type of transformation she will undergo. Obviously, she will have to have a fast transformation due to the time limit of the animation (4-6 seconds). I looked at a lot of animation environments, most of then seemed to fit what I had envisioned for her house. As the original creator of Olivia had already looked up the house setting I already had a clear idea of what kind of room I was dealing with. I had to study the character to see the way she would walk and act.

Expressions

Facial expressions for my siren:

Construction

This is the construction for my siren character Scarlet.
She's going to be 10 and a half heads tall. She is a siren so i wanted her to be pretty tall, i wanted her arms to be longer than an average persons arms also.

Character Design

Research:

Im making a story about a young siren, Scarlet, that falls in love with a human but the job of a siren is to kill humans. Her mother, Maeve, finds out and captures the Pirate/Sailor, Ferdinand, causing him to die.