Animating Illustrations: Illustration 1

Recently, I have been inspired by the artist Rebeca Mock's work, who uses slight hints of animation in still illustrations to add life to an an image, and tell a story without having to make a full image or video, or have another page/panel/image. I feel like thinking about small details like this would help my practice a lot, thinking about what is happening in an image, how I could show this, and how to really enhance any small details in my pieces.

For my first illustration, I took a drawing from my sketchbook (a season inspired piece of fanart and relevant right now) and decided to turn it into a full illustration. I tend to just draw characters without any context, and since Mock creates full scenes in her images, this is a great chance to actually try adding a background too. I usually stick to basic colouring or get a bit too carried away trying to pain something and not being fully happy with it. This time, I thought it would be best to actually use reference images and tutorials and actually stick to the way I intended to create the image.

I found a few reference images of  christmassy living room on Google creating a palette from the most popular colours in the images, and blocked out some basic shapes. I didn't want to background to be too busy and full of detail since I had a lot of other things to concentrate on, and I wanted the viewers to pay more attention to the characters and the animation.

I hid the background and create a new layer with a solid light brown colour, to give me something to work with while colouring. After inking my characters, I set the lines to a dark red/brown colours so that they were less harsh, and worked much better with the background and feel of the image. Using my palette created earlier, I blocked out the characters' base colours, making some adjustments to get a nicer contrast.

For the shading, I found a tutorial that I have read a few times, but never actually put into practice before. I usually just try to figure out the right colours based on my knowledge of colour theory and do them on top of the base colour, but the tutorial I found uses a greyscale layout with multiply, with extra detail and colours added afterwards. I changed the hue and saturation of my shade layer to a warmer, pink colour to go with the feel of the image. I used warmer shades for the shadows, and lighter, colder colours for the main lighting, coming from a very light window with lots of blue outside. I did the same for the furniture and background objects, trying to keep the colouring style consistent.

The tutorial can be found here.

I wanted to leave the skin do do myself, using more of a normal cel shading technique, with a blurred layer of the flat shadow underneath it.

On top of this I created a subtle yellow to orange gradient, using it as an overlay to enhance the image. I tweaked any parts of the images that needed some colour correction or more or less contrast, until the image looked close to finished.

After this, I moved on to animating in this post.