PART TWO: Watercolors

In this part of the project, I was still on the same path, and I started working on the backgrounds for the 'Outside' sequence. I decided to try using watercolor washes to paint the backgrounds, which was a bit of a risk, because I had never used watercolors in any context before. But hey, it's an experimental animation course, so why the hell not?

After a ouple of false starts, I got the hang of the washes. I decided to paint two versions of the background and have the two washes dissolve into each other constantly (this was some good advice from Martin). I figure it would make the background look less static, and I wanted it to look like the rain is affecting the background. I also made the decision to paint each part of the outside seperately; the logic there was that if I screwed something up, only one element would have to be re-drawn, rather than the whole thing.

And so it went, and went, and went. The coloring took longer than I thought it would take, probably over a week's worth of afternoons in total. I got it all scanned and composited, with all of the washes fading in and out in constant chain dissolves.

I re-used my rain cycle for earlier for the rain, but I had to make new splashes for the puddles (this time, it was another 5-frame cycle, but on a 8-frame loop, so the cycle would be less noticable). When I composited the rain and the splashes in After Effects, I simply changed their blending mode to Overlay to make them white. Easy!

Here is my initial test.

And here is the final product. (Note: I think the compression screwed up the colors a bit. It's supposed to look more blue and contrasty.)


The outside was finished. Now to tackle the inside...