Progress update #62 (Patreon)

One of the things that I struggle the most with, in my animations, is the backgrounds. When I make them in After Effects I usually go overboard and add too much detail, the software slows down, and it ends up taking a lot of time to finish a single background.

The super rad animation that I'm working on right now, has a plethora of different scenarios, and that means a lot of different backgrounds. So I needed to find a way to make my work more efficient without sacrificing the quality. But after some failed attempts in After Effects, I realized that a change in style would be inevitable, and I decided to try some Photoshop painting.

You can see on the left my first (very bad) attempt at this new style. I just brought over the After Effects vectors to Photoshop, added outlines, overlaid some textures on top of it, and it kind of looks like shit! Of course, the lighting in these two pictures is completely different, it's kind of an unfair comparison, but there's more to it than just the colors.

I actually wanted to recreate something similar to a Scott Wills or a Bill Wray acrylic painting, like their early work on Ren and Stimpy:

Unfortunately, my work is nowhere near as good. I'm still relying too much on textures and other effects, instead of just focusing on the painting, and that makes it look digital. But I'm sure that the quality will improve as I finish more backgrounds and become more familiar with the process. Nowadays Scott works with Photoshop too, and his work looks just like a real acrylic painting.

So far I've only painted two of these backgrounds, and I can already tell that this is the way to go. It doesn't take long to make them, and I think they look better than my After Effects vectors. I might try this style with the next TBSP as well!

In my last post, I said that I was gonna try to record a new WIP video, for every new progress update. And do have a new one here, but it's not related to this project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfHZwkFblQQ this is an intro that I made for Matt's Sonic Adventure 2 playthrough! But in the next update, I will have a speed paint video for one of the new backgrounds!