Mazed Project

Our class was given a new project to produce an animation short for mazedtales.org, which would be put in an app that the company will be producing. The animation shorts consist on stories about Cornwall that tourists would be able to look at when they visit certain locations.

The class was split into groups and each given a Cornish story that they would have to animate. The group that I was in was given 'The Legend of the Cheesewring'. For this project I was the art director and background artist. After reading the script and quick internet searches of our location, we decided on a simple style animation, cartoon like.

These are the first initial sketches that I made of our location, Stowes Hill and Craddock Moor.

I decided to try watercolour because I thought it would give it a nice textured look. I scanned them in and then edited it in photoshop slightly just to make the colours stand out more. I do like the simple style of these, but I don't think they give the actual landscape any justice and they look too generic.

So, I tried painting in photoshop. I'm not that experienced in painting on this software but I wanted to see if the backgrounds would look good if they were computer generated. I was in the middle of painting when I realized that it wouldn't match the character designs that were being created.

I did find it hard to draw/paint the backgrounds without having any first hand photos of the area. It would be nice to get the feel of the place and visit the area to see how it is mapped out.