Not Stopping Believing

After the building the background in the last post, I moved on to creating the rest of the scene elements. I had already built the villain’s head ; now he needed a body. I tried a slightly different approach for this piece of the project. Instead of going all the way back to drawing board and creating tighter sketch with pencil, I went straight into Illustrator and drew a rough using the pencil tool.

Here’s the original sketch, for reference:

I built the geometry for the body elements directly over the rough pencil, using gray tones to help me flesh out the big blocks of color.

Here he is, all finished. I warmed up the colors a bit, so he’ll match the background I built. I kinda liked the gray tones, so he stayed pretty close to that palette.

Here he is in the environment, with a little cigarette smoke added.

So since I’m headed toward a little 70s vibe, I wanted to try and make the image look a little dated, like it would like on an old TV. So I blurred the image, then placed a copy of the image on top of itself, skewed just a little to the right, to give it a little bit of that bad TV reception look. Click on the image to see a high-res version.

Here’s a slight alternate with a little more distortion. I put some vertical hold bars in there.

OK, so remember the Burmese Temple from a few posts back? Well here we are inside, with the Evil Dude training his guys in the ways of evil karate. This is a close up of evil guy as he watches his minions. At a certain point, one minion throws a punch in front of his face while practicing. The the evil guy catches the guy by the wrist without blinking. It will look something like this:

So behind him is the jungle and such. I tried a more khaki toned background instead of the intense maroons and purples from the Burmese temple drawing, and I kind of like it. I might try one closer to the palette of the original temple drawing to compare.

Anyway, here’s how I built it, piece by piece, using those Photoshop brushes I was telling you about.

First of all, I needed a good color palette to steal from. I have a hard time inventing colors to use, so I look around for some source material in the color zone that I like and sample the key colors from its palette. I found some really cool TV promo spots created for the CMT Outlaws Concert that had a great style, and a great earthy palette. I’m not a huge CMT fan, but I like these spots a lot.

I pulled the lightest tone from the spot and painted a rough backdrop tone with one of those crazy Photoshop brushes using my tablet.

Next I put in some mountains using the next darkest color. The opacity of the mountains is cranked down a little to let some of the texture show through.

I darkened the base of the mountains a bit using a slightly warmer color.

Then I painted in a temple column on the left, added some trees using another special photoshop brush, and knocked back the tops of the mountains into the haze by painting the sky color over them a little. Like so:

This is from the first sequence I’m building for the short animated film I’m working on. It’s not the first scene in the film, just a good place to start. The unibrow was a happy accident. I started carving out the eyebrows as a single piece, and they just looked too good that way.