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.