Colour/Texture Tests

When I was visualising the overall style of my film, I thought I'd really like to try experimenting with textures along with painterly backgrounds to take the edge of the sharp, flat colours that are typical of Flash animation. My main inspiration for this was Cartoon Network's Chowder, which colours parts of clothes and scenery by having its characters moving over stationary textures, as you can see in the video clip below.





I think this is really nice effect that should theoretically be very simple to do using masks in Flash, so for now I've done a few quick tests to see how adding textures will look.


This is the texture I'm experimenting with, originally blue ink splats turned greyscale in Photoshop, then colorised with a yellow hue.


I then used the overlay blending option in Photoshop to make the texture appear as part of the colouring.



Here you can se how the effect works with the background in comparison to the flat colours. Personally I like it a lot, though I think it requires a little tweaking to avoid texture over-kill... At the moment the ink splat texture combined with the already painterly texture of the background feels a little overpowering. I'll have to experiment more after the deadline when I have time.

Character Colours

Here are a few colour tests for Tizz. Rather than give her an ugly, harsh black outline that looks typically 'Flash', I decided to try outlining each component of her designs with a darker colour of what it's filled with, hopefully giving her a much softer edge as a result. Personally I really like the effect and I think it's worth the extra effort to make her look more traditional, plus this way she won't clash with the backgrounds.



-Auburn hair is just the might mix of red and brown to look interesting, compliments the bright yellow coat.
- Yellow coat/hat is the right shade of warm, golden yellow to contrast and compliment the blue and purples of the sky without looking garish.
- Blue tights and purple boots work well with the yellow coat/hat, and since they'll only every be seen against the green on the grass there's no fear of them blending in with the sky.

I'm pretty much set on this as my final colour palette, but here are a few of the other options I tried before making my decision.



-I like the idea of red hair, but this is too orangey-red for my liking.
-Green compliments the red well, but again is too similar to the grass.



-Blue coat/hat contrasts well with the blode hair, but will blend in too much with the sky/backgrounds.
-Grey boots look too dull and boring. Kids should have brightly coloured wellies!



-Pink strikes me as too girly a colour for Tizz, also a little to close to red. I don't want people to think she a variation on Red Riding Hood.
-Not sure I'm keen on her being blonde either... Something about it just doesn't suit her.



-Colours look off, not keen on the shades
-Green boots will belend in with the grass