Position and Colour Mood Boards

Once final designs where complete, there were other aspects which needed to be figured out. The colourings and final positioning of each character had yet to be figured out. We knew the kind of positions we wanted, but the problem was making sure that these positions were drawn correctly. My experience with drawing these animals in a realistic sense was quite minimal, since this is first time I haven't ever paid this much attention on how to draw an animal correctly. 

We knew we wanted the boar to be sitting, however there are many different ways a sitting position of an animal can be drawn. This is why I created this mood board above, to get an idea of not only how his positioning could be drawn, but also what colours would work well together and what colours may clash. 

For the wolf, the positioning was much harder to finalise, as well as the colour, so I ended up creating a mood board for each. After the digital testings I had produced, I knew that the colours for this animal needed to go down a much more copper brown route. The top of the wolfs fur would be much darker and then fade down into brown. 

This mood board above also helped me to establish the final positioning for the wolf. Emma and I decided that having the wolf sitting on a rock would be a good idea because it would allow this scene to be more distinguished. It would also allow the wolf to have a more relaxed, dominating persona. Not in a threatening way, but just enough to make it obvious that this character has very little to worry about apart from looking elegant. Since there will be a range of shot framing, Emma and I decided that it would be a good idea  to have the wolf sat with its back end curled in, with just the tip of the tail sticking out. This seemed beneficial for three reasons, it would help simplify the animation process, the end of the tail could still be animated and having a range of shot framing will give us opportunity to show the wolf at a different angle anyway. 

This mood board below was a way of figuring out how bright the robin's colourings would need to be. Colourings on robins do tend to be more rusty than bright. After researching some other example of cartoon robins, it seemed apparent that a lot of them had quite harsh colourings, which isn't what I wanted. The characters needed to be bright enough to be distinctive and so that they wont blend into the background too much, however, they needed to stay relatively natural in order to fit with the purpose of this documentary. 

The shade of brown used for this character will need to be fairly light, because the boar we be a much heavier shade of brown and the wolf will be very coppery, so each character needs to be distinctive.