OUAN503 - Collaborative, Colouring Scenes

We intended to work and complete this project in the most efficient way possible, as we didn't want this brief alone to take up all of our time and in addition to this, the deadline was less than three weeks ago due to the delays we had at the start of the project when establishing an idea and making a real start. To continue this ethos, we planned to do all of the colouring of the scenes in regards to the scenes digitally in Photoshop. The idea behind this method was not only the efficiency that we needed, but also the consistency in colour and style across the work as much as possible. Using a digital method we could colour pick and use the same brushes for example to create a consistent colour palette across all of the scenes and animations. This was a decision made early on when we were discussing our work flow. I found out by asking Ian that he prefers to work digitally when colouring work, and since I have too we decided to take on the responsibility of doing the majority of the colouring between us.

The technique used to colour the different scenes is as straight forward as it gets and it's something I've done many times across a range of projects. Once the drawing is scanned in and opened in Photoshop, by simply creating a layer above the drawing layer and setting the layer property to 'multiply' you're free to add colour but still retain the original lines. Which is a style we were going for due to the fun 'cartoon' style we were trying to achieve. As well as this it's also quite a quick way to work and due to the tight deadline it meant that any mistakes made by colouring could simply be undone rather than if we had coloured it by hand and a mistake could of potentially meant having to redo an entire scene or drawing. Like I mentioned previously, it also meant we could easily be consistent with our choice of colours and it was simply a case of sampling colours from a previous scene and making sure it was in line without selected colour palette - giving us consistent colours throughout the animation. Overall, the colouring stage was one of the longest stages of the process because it was divided up pretty much between me and Ian. Chay and Tilly were drawing more of the scenes and passing them to us for colouring so that the production of scenes and backgrounds was quite consistent. It was a relief when all the scenes had been created and were ready for the next stage which was sequencing and animating - a part of the process with a lot more variation and room for experimentation unlike the drawing and colouring stages which were quite monotonous.

Below are some examples of the scenes that were created for the animations that I think worked best and that I really liked as stand alone images;



The process I used was to simply layer on colour until I thought the piece was of a high enough quality to use as a scene, here are a few steps of the process;