Art Direction Stage - "Broken Egg": Part II

So this is the second post in the Art Direction stage for “Broken Egg” so if you haven’t read that yet, you might want to in order to get the whole picture of the Art Direction stage. Ok, on with the post.Now that I’ve gotten a feel for painting with Corel Painter to get the art style I was after, I’m going to move on to the characters. Depending on the project, you can do the characters first (which actually is usually what I do), but with this project each story element will be an art panel so the backgrounds will play a little more of a role than usual being that there is no movement in the foreground to wrestle any of the focus away. Each image will have to be composed with that in mind when I go forward with production so that the action within each image is clearly visible.For the character study I usually start with a piece of paper and a pencil. I sketch out fast and very rough some interpretations of what the characters might look like. In this short, the characters will be anthropomorphized food items – which lead to some interesting problems to solve as far as style clashing. Like I said in the last post, I’m going after a picture book style so I’m lucky that I have some reference on how to achieve a textured and painterly background with characters that have cartoonish features and not have them fighting for style rights.My job at the moment is to study the food items the characters are based upon first so that I can figure out the best way to attach the facial features later. It’s basically still life sketching.There is a cabbage, a couple carrots, a carton of eggs, and two tomatoes on the vine: sketch time.

When sketching the eggs, I hate to make sure I could handle the different angles, but also that I could handle the carton being thrown around and how the torque on the carton affects how the eggs sit and how much movement I could show the eggs going through while still being within reason that they would stay within the carton.

When I got to the tomatoes there was a specific scene that I wanted to try out. The female tomato is hanging off an edge (note the edge is something bendable; it’ll make sense in later blogs when you start to get the story) while the male tomato is holding onto her. I needed to know that I could do that scene because I wasn’t quite sure about it when I thought it up (I thought of complications regarding the vine that it might not look right). I sketched on some faces and I felt pretty good about them. They’re simple, uncomplicated faces which go with my kid’s picture book theme in that hopefully when they’re first seen it’ll be a bit disarming – that nothing too bad could happen because they’re so cartoony. However, again while going forward I have to make sure that the styles don’t clash.

Since I did that with the tomatoes, I thought now would be a good time to go back and put faces on the main eggs and see if they work the way I want them to.

They do. Now I need to put all the character’s together in one place and unify their style.

I put some simple color in there just for reference (not that I don’t know tomatoes are red and carrots are orange haha).I have to make special mention at this point that this is not how I will paint these characters in the end. I’m going to make a bit of a faux pas here and just move on to the next stage. Technically I should put all the characters together in a mock up scene with the background and test it out, style wise, but I’m falling a bit behind schedule due to other commitments and I think I have a feeling for how this is all going to come out; so I’m going with my gut on this one.The next post will be on storyboards (one of my personal favorite stages).