Material Research

From the beginning, Emma and I knew that we wanted to take this opportunity to use watercolour as our main medium for this animation. I am quite experienced with watercolour, so this is something I was really looking forward to! However, we both felt it was necessary to carry out some research just to make sure we both had a similar idea of how we wanted these textures to look.

Both of us have a love for the texture design used in "The Secret of Kells" and "Song of The Sea" by Cartoon Saloon. Both of us went away and produced some boards showing examples of work that we admire, and luckily we were on the same track! The use of colour spotting and multiple layers can have a really nice effect, especially when creating textures for a natural environment, so this is the route we wanted to go down. 

Abby Diamond

As part of the process of establishing how to go about texturing the animals, Emma recommended an artist to look up who works in a similar way to what we were thinking of. Abby Diamond paints animals quite freely, with looks like a mix of watercolour and inks. Researching this work was really interesting, because I was struggling at first to figure out how to go about texturing the animals. I was paying particular attention to the way in which she goes about painting feathers, At this point we were still figuring out weather or not to have the robins feathers actually painted like feathers, or to simply use the same sort of patchy texture that would be used for the body. We did decide, that keeping it patchy would be a good idea, because we wanted to keep things consistent.