Today I want to share with you the process behind ‘Venus Rebirth’, the first piece in my collection ‘Reimagining Art History’ on Foundation.
My process usually starts in Procreate, using the OG ‘Procreate Pencil’. For me, it all starts with that first sketch where I lay down the idea and the raw emotions of the piece. I loosely sketch the concept, with no ties to anything in particular. I only take in mind I still want ‘Venus’ as the most important part of the composition.
When I am working on Sketch #1, I like to use a red pencil, which I will explain the reason why I do this further down this post.
After I finish Sketch #1, I move onto Sketch #2. For this second sketch, I am thinking about every little line that will soon become part of the finished linework.
As you can see, for Sketch #2 I use a blue pencil. which brings me back to why I used a red pencil for the Sketch #1 to start with. I use different color pencils so I can clearly see the improvements I made between the different versions. If both sketches had black linework, it would be really hard to see what changed, so this method eases my eyes to clearly see all the changes.
After finishing with the sketches, I move into what I consider to be the final linework. I also sketch the background a little bit to get a sense on how the composition is working.
And now comes one of my favorite parts, which is sketching/blocking the animation. This part is very time consuming, but extremely rewarding once you see life has been created out of a still image! For this part of the process I use Rough Animator. Again, I use different colors to help my eye clearly differentiate the different moving pieces of the animation.
After I am happy with the movements, I bring it back to Procreate to tighten the linework… yes I know… I am coming back and forth between these programs, but that is because unfortunately I don’t have a Cintiq just yet, and can’t comfortably draw in Photoshop all these animations with my tiny tablet. For now the iPad wins, because I am super comfy laying in the couch while drawing this. One day when I have my Cinitq, my process will be cut by half, since I will only deal with Photoshop for the animation, linework and coloring.
After I am happy with the main characters animations I now go ahead an animate all the extra stuff, including foreground elements, flowers, and trees.
After this step has been finished I now carefully color one frame of the animation. In this step, I am being extremely careful when picking these colors, because if I mess up the colors on frame #1 and continue to color all the other frames, then I need to re-color ALL of the frames with the correct color again. So, this is the most cautious step of all of them, so I don’t work harder, but smarter in the long run!
Once I am in love with the colors and shadows of frame #1, I go ahead and do a final test in B&W to make sure the values are spot on.
After this I move on to coloring all the frames of the animation, including the linework! :) Here’s the end result of all the coloring!
After that step is done, I carefully separate each section of the piece into layers because in the last step of this process, I will use these different layers to create depth.
Here’s a few example of the layers I created:
If you are still confused as to why I created so many layers, I was attempting to achieve a ‘Parallax Effect’ where multiple 2D layers are created and overlapped one on top of the other to achieve a 3D effect.
Here’s an example of how it works:
This technique goes all the way back to traditional animation where it was used as a way to create depth, despite the existing ‘flat’ look of it.
For creating the ‘Parallax Effect’ I used After Effects, since it was very easy to find tutorials on how to achieve this lo
Here’s an example of how the layers look like when looking at them from the side. Also, you can clearly see them stacked in the horizontal lines displayed in the left screen of this image:
As a final touch, I then add some grain, a vignette and chromatic aberration to give it that polished final look!
I hope you liked this breakdown and are not freaked out by the amount of steps I do to create these pieces! I hope, in the contrary, you find this inspiring! 2D animation is my passion and I think you can already tell by the amount of care and love I put into each step of this process.
Thank you for reading my first ‘Behind The Art’ Series!
See you next time :)