Color tests/Composition Experiments

Lately, I've been learning a lot about composition and cinematography, thanks to a class I'm taking taught by Gil Zimmerman- the head of layout on How to Train Your Dragon 1 and 2. It's on a Friday night, and my only Friday class, so that really stinks, but judging from the material I've learned from that class I'd say it's worth the sacrifice. Before taking this class, I assumed composition was simply placing cameras and your shots in a way that looks aesthetically pleasing, but I'm starting to realize more and more that cinematography can play such a huge part in playing stories! Gil showed us this video series called Hollywood Camera Work, which used stand-still figures that slide around to show how camera angles and composition can tell a story. That blew my mind. 

So anyways, I've gotten back into a streak of working really hard and I've been on a roll for this past week! Aside from studying cinematography and reading books outside of class (Framed Ink and The Filmmaker's Eye,) I've also tried to do this exercise where I crank out one digital painting in an hour. The first one took me two hours, but the last two I did in one hour, and ended up playing around with colors towards the end. I realized that my color choices are actually usually pretty crappy, because I end up wanting to use every color of the rainbow, and then everything turns really muddy, so I had to constantly go back to find references of artists like Pascal Campion who is a genius at color. I also needed to look up a bunch of films and see how they composed their shots and mimicked those shots. 

testing out skies and a simpler way of painting

p.s. side note: the above image was inspired by one of the pictures I took at the Leighton house! I wanted to capture how the sky looked and thought it would be really cool reference for the final transformation of my little town. 

Reference photo for  the sky

Noemi looking out to her gloomy neighborhood

Also I started studying the houses around Vermont Avenue, and combining them with the houses of Hooverville during the great depression. I love the colors of the houses in Vermont, but the hooverville houses have soooo much character! Here is a quick sketch that I did of both types of houses- I tried to make Noemi's shack more hooverville-looking in my last painting exercise.Hopefully I can somehow bring in characteristics from both types of houses.

Below is a drawing of Noemi's shack, that I based off of the hooverville houses I found online.

I was too lazy to draw Noemi in the house, but this is when random neighbors pass by and she gets scared

playing with different color choices

more colors! This is more sickly-looking and reminds me of The Backwater Gospel

Anyways. I'm super excited and really hope this animation buzz will last me throughout the year. One can dream!