Colouring in

Originally during the concept stages of my animation I had planned to paint watercolour backgrounds for my animation. I wanted to use watercolour, as not only do I really enjoy working in this medium, but I felt it would provide some additional depth in the 2D world I was creating.

I started painting the first scene, and completed a painting that was 'nice', but it felt too 'realistic' and it didn't suit the simple line style that had developed throughout the animation. I wanted to maintain her look as a boring 2 dimensional character, so decided this would be best showcased with her simple design and coloured in a flat grey. Because I needed her to be distinguished in this way, the background needed to provide a platform of to demonstrate the stark contrast between her and her environment, whilst complimenting the overall style. In addition to this, I needed the world that my character was passing through to be somewhat abstract, and so somewhat easily applied to any city, town or country.

Watercolour alone didn't achieve the rich, gritty world I was after. I remembered, back to late last year, when I had experimented with using textures in a couple of animation exercises. It had produced a great effect that was both graphic, but also offered a sense of depth that I was after.

So I spent a weekend gathering and making my own textures, using watercolour washes, gouache, textile materials, paper and photographs and merged these together to create the background environments. I've included some of these below.