CINEMATIC :: 13/03/16 - Matte Painting and Concept updates

Over the course of the week we learned about Matte painting and started putting our design ideas into practice.  My giant creature was received pretty well and we are now using it as our central spirit character.  Tea asked me to elongate it in order to make it fit Oscar's ideas a little better, and over Friday, Saturday and Sunday, I managed to come up with a more advanced concept for it.

Tea and Jo are also working on smaller creature concepts, and may be drawing inspiration from this new elongated spirit creature that I started with.  Over next week I plan to create a proper turnaround for it and work out some design tweaks and textures for its skin - the initial creature was very dark and we want them to be bright and stand out in our spirit world, so a color palette overhaul may be necessary.


The other thing I worked on over the weekend was applying the Matte painting practices that Thaw taught us over the week, using a bunch of new brushes that I downloaded in Krita.  Oscar asked for a vibrant world with a sort of oil painting or stylized feel to it.  In the process of trying to get the hang of Matte Painting, I came up with the following image:

It utilizes a bristle brush and leaf patterns, along with a color palette selected from the background.  The background itself is a photo of reflective salt flats at night, with a nebula pillar cropped and placed in the background with a 'lighten' effect.  As a stylized reference i think it looks quite lovely for a first try!

Hamish has showed me the method he's been using to create plates for scenes by using a photo and drawing over the assets within it using layers and the lasso tool to create plates.  I might spend the next week doing something similar in order to create the kind of landscape that we're after.

By the end of next week, we're expected to have an animatic, so I would like to spend this time solidifying our background and getting the hang of matte painting, as well as creating a solidified creature in terms of design and shape.  Color and movement can come later, once the animatic is taken care of.