Princess e-book Update

In my mad dash to finish all the clean-up for this project, I ended up accidentally putting the wrong outfit on one of the characters. Oops. So this week has been spent going back and fixing everything. Sigh. It's my own fault, but finding out about it made me feel like a woman in an old horror flick. All I could really do is strike a pose and scream. On the bright side, I'm almost finished with it and two of my colorists are in the end stages of their most recent scenes. So this setback hasn't hurt production too much. Phew!

The Leviathan Scene

On the upside, I finished another scene this week, so I only have one more scene to clean before everything goes into the color stage. The downside is that the last scene I have to clean up is a crazy mess of lines with 120 separate drawings that all need to be subtle and precise (you can see a few of them just above the drawing of Mom and Princess in that timeline). Through out the whole clean-up process, I've been working on this scene off and on. Every time I try to tackle it, I just get frustrated and move on to a scene I know I can clean quickly. This is my great white whale. Hopefully my story with this mighty beast ends better than Captain Ahab's.

The Clean Up Process

A great presentation by Blue Sky yesterday kept me from posting a Pick-Up Princess update until today.

I've mentioned before that I'm at the tail end of clean up and about to begin color, so I thought I would share a few examples of what that is and why it is necessary before any coloring can happen.

The animation that my crew helped me out on was the rough animation. This is where all the movement is worked out and the pacing is established. While the animator needs to keep the basic shapes of the character consistent, they have more wiggle room when it comes to keeping the character looking exactly like the character sheet and in a first pass, it's not important for them to be very clean with their lines. Rough animation is all about gesture, moving your lines, and letting expression control your hand. That's what makes it so fun.

Clean up is all about precision. The scene is about to move into color and the colorists need to know where to put that color. So not only must the lines be clean, but the character must match the character sheet to remain consistent through out the piece.To maintain consistency, I am doing all the clean up for this project myself.  It's a tedious job, but a necessary one.

Here are a few examples of the two:

rough animation by eric monchello 

 

rough animation by margaretta westerman

rough animation by debbie scheller