Background Styles

While working on the storyboard for my upcoming animated short film, ‘Bear’, I simultaneously have been working on a background style for it.

I have a quite good idea in mind of what style I’ll be using for the characters (perhaps a post on that to follow- we’ll see), though backgrounds are something I’ve often previously struggled with. I think this is because when I create clips to practise my animation, I usually focus on the thing that moves (so the character) as my intention has always been to explore animation styles, not the background.

I also used to find digitally drawing them really difficult on my Wacom (not a display tablet)- drawing on my tablet has never felt that natural, so any images which weren’t things I was rotoscoping seemed to take forever and be hard to get the strokes right. I also used to find drawing with Photoshop a fairly clunky experience, despite the amount of digital artists who do use this software. This was all until I purchased my iPad and downloaded Procreate, that drawing digitally finally just felt like drawing on paper and really natural. I wish I had known this all along!

With my new tools, I decided to create a couple of ‘test’ backgrounds. As I said I already knew what style I’ll be going for with my characters (a black outline, with the colour/ shading being quite bold/ graphic/ clean), I wanted to make the backgrounds contrast with this, enhancing the characters and making them stand out (after all they are the focus).

I want the backgrounds to clearly be ‘there’, but not distract, so something impressionistic was what I was looking to achieve. Though, not too impressionistic or abstract that we can’t see what is happening! I also didn’t want the background to include any outlines in attempt to remove it further from the character style.

After quite a lot of trial and error with different brushes (I’m very new to Procreate), I decided to use the ‘Spectra’ brush for the majority of it, with a variety of other brushes for the other elements such as the sky (exterior) and the floor/ walls (interior). This brush gave a gentle pastel kind of effect and gave me the right texture I was looking for.

I made the exterior one first, though decided to also make an interior one, to see how the look would translate on both as my film contains a variety of settings. I think the style is consistent across the two (something which I was worried about) and it definitely contrasts with the proposed character style. So I think I achieved what I wanted.

One thing I haven’t quite decided yet is how to do any props/ anything the character interacts with. An idea I have had, would be to give certain elements a black outline, so it’s more in keeping with the character, but have them coloured in the way the background is. This will act as a nice cross over between the two styles and could really work for the props. This will be something I need to experiment with first, as it will also mean doing some animation in Procreate- something I’m yet to try...

Below are the two background images.