Return from Christmas

 After I returned in January and had submitted all of my own work, I got straight back onto Bryony's backgrounds. After speaking with her and reviewing my last piece, she asked me to experiment with depth of field and a blue palette for the dark night scenes in the beginning of her film, she'd also developed a new design for the trees that she wanted me to incorporate into my studies. I went straight to a PC and came out with the following image. I was really rusty after the christmas break and it took me quite some time to compete this image, and I was not happy with it at all.

Way too dark. I usually started with a background base colour, and gradually chose darker colours as I came closer to the foreground. Here I had definitely started with a colour that was too dark, and so the rest of the piece is way too dark. 

This was the image after I'd played around with levels to make it a little lighter. 

A subtle change of Hue here.

And a more drastic hue change. Bry did not want browns in her film at all, but I saved this as I personally quite liked it.

I did not want to present that piece to Bryony, or any of the changed versions, so I started again, making more reference to the previous study I'd done before Christmas and the reference images Bryony had supplied me with. Although, like I've stated above, I had a hard time deciding what kind of tone/colour was best to have in the background, as she had stated that she wanted the Night scenes to be all blue and quite dark. So I did a quick google image search for Blue Forests.   

These images helped me to realise that I could start with a lighter background colour than I had been, and still achieve an over-all dark looking forest. Bryony had also given me a shaded animatic, and so I looked to that for reference as well.

This helped me a little, although this had a more lilac palette, and I need to work more blue into it. 

I attempted the scene again;

Here is the original first attempt, I tried hard to start lighter to work my way darker. I was pleased with the colour of the trees and plants, leaning towards a blue palette but not completely blue. Hints of aqua and purple are in there too.

This one I'd made darker by putting a plain dark blue background in, this was Bry's favourite one from this bunch. And mine, I think. 

And this one I made a bit misty-er by dulling out the background detail with a wash of pale blue. 

After seeing these, Bry pointed out that she liked the detail on the trees, and that maybe working from one of her pencil drawings with a solid line would be interesting as well. She liked the purple and the aqua colours to. So I went back to her animatic and freeze framed a layout to work from, so that I could visualize what it would look like with a pencil line. 

I broke the above freeze frame down into layers to colour in, with her comments about colour in mind.

This piece was the most graphic so far, and she initially loved it, and liked the purple in the foreground, and the lighter lines on the trees towards the back. However, and I agree with this, it is too graphic and cartoony for the over all feel of her film. 

And so from here, she was going to draw some backgrounds for me to work with the lines, and she wanted me to keep at it.