'Bear' Colour Style

Deciding on the colour style for ‘Bear’ was a fairly straightforward process, as while I was creating the outlines, in the back of my mind I was always thinking of how to colour it. Before the animating began and even in my initial ideas phase for this film before it was even a script, I also had a quite strong idea of how I wanted it to look.

I guess this is because I’m a fairly visual thinker and when I have a story idea or concept, I usually have some imagery alongside that, whether that be in my head or down on paper. It’s also come from a development of my style in the work I create outside of my films, such as the short clips you read about on this very blog or see on my Instagram.

Not only this, but I had to bear (no pun intended) in mind that there’s a fair amount of shots to colour in a limited time with a crew of just me, so I can’t be overly complex with my designs or I’ll never manage to finish the film! Despite this, I wanted to move away from block colour, like in my previous film ‘Nothing New’ (and a lot of my other short films) as to say that I have developed as an animator/ artist, while still wanting the workload to be manageable.

So, I bet you’re wondering what style I ended up going for? Well look no further…

As you can see, I have used block colour for the most part of it, though have added some shading on the character to give it a little something extra. I did this using EbSynth. I also textured the bear head. I would have loved to be afforded the time to have textured the whole thing because I’m a sucker for the textured look, but I feel having the bear head as the only thing which is textured makes it stand out (which it should do), plus gives a sense of fur. So I’m totally cool with the decision to texture only one element.

I coloured the character in TVPaint using the CTG layers, which is a fairly quick process- at least on the shots where he isn’t moving around too much! In just over one day, I managed to colour and texture 25 shots, which I was super happy about. I feel the EbSynth shading part will take a little longer due to the amount of touch up which I’m anticipating, but if I colour the rest of the shots at a similar rate, the timescale shouldn’t be a problem. I considered leaving the shading out due to time, but I do think it adds something to the character, plus really shows development in my work which for me is important to display in this film. I textured the head in TVPaint as well, using the brush ‘Acrylic 4’- which gave me the look I was after. Even though there are probably ‘better’ brushes elsewhere such as Photoshop and Procreate, I wanted to keep everything in TVPaint as for the life of me I can’t stand how non-specific animation programs have their weird way of animating- it feels really unintuitive and I honestly can’t get my head around how it’s done! I love the way programs built for animation make sense such as TVPaint and Callipeg, though the latter unfortunately lacks in brush options. The TVPaint brushes are more than sufficient for my needs and I know I can either make some or purchase some, should I need.

Below is a screen grab of the swatch I’ve created for my main character.

I went for a fairly muted/ desaturated palette, as I felt it would suit the tone of the film more than using bright/ vibrant colours would. Without giving away any of the narrative, the story isn’t exactly a super happy one, so using fluorescent colours definitely didn’t suit! I’m really happy with the colours I’ve chosen, after a little trial and error to get something which works.

This week will mostly be colour/ texture work, though I’m going to make a start on background designs too, due to not being able to colour some shots without a background- so look out for that post in the next few days…