Colour Keys (Patreon)

Animation is just about done on the first two new episodes, apart from a bunch of colouring and lipsync. While continuing to work on that stuff in the evenings, the big thing I'm tackling this week is painting the backgrounds for the first big episode of the season, which once again is set mostly at Katy and Ashley's place. There are a ton of new angles, but I was also able to reuse some from "Katy's Birthday" back in season 1. The colour in this new one is less moody and stylized than that episode's intense monochromatic party atmosphere, so I have to recolour everything... but starting with existing line art is still a big time-saver.

Anyway, I wanted to share some pics of my colour design process, which is basically that I take a lineup of the characters and then block out the basic environment around them, often tweaking their colours in Photoshop to fit better as well. Then I use this as reference for both the animation in Flash, and the backgrounds in PS. Colour keys are a fun part of the process where I can play around until I land on something I'm happy with. Sometimes I'll come back a week later with fresh eyes and tweak one or two elements. The hard part is pushing myself to make bold choices, since I don't really have a strong colour sense and I can drift towards neutral, muddy tones if I don't catch myself. It can be helpful to start with colours that are obviously way too much and then pull back from there. Anyway, here you can see a bunch of examples from past episodes, including the very first one where I was designing Subpar.