One background in different styles

[PARKER]

Just a background i made in anime studio in different styles.

I used a lot of textures, one bg has out lines, other doenst, other with sketchy lines and another with sepia.

http://parkerx87.deviantart.com/art/ani ... -170476082

http://parkerx87.deviantart.com/art/ani ... -170476292

http://parkerx87.deviantart.com/art/ani ... -170476356

Enjoy:

[lwaxana]

Wow, those look amazing! The drawing style has great character. If you're looking for critique, I'd suggest trying the leaves on the tree and in the flower box with the same style as the blue/purple leaves behind the red building. That may fit better with the overall style. I think the selective use of lines in background4 works really well with the drawing style. Nice work!

[PARKER]

Wow, those look amazing! The drawing style has great character. If you're looking for critique, I'd suggest trying the leaves on the tree and in the flower box with the same style as the blue/purple leaves behind the red building. That may fit better with the overall style. I think the selective use of lines in background4 works really well with the drawing style. Nice work!

Yes, i was thinking in fixing the plants of the purple building and i totally forgot, thank you for reminding me.

[lpbaker]

Just a background i made in anime studio in different styles.

They all look good, but I think the last one looks the best. The shoe is a nice touch

You drew this in AS?

~ Lindsay

[AmigaMan]

Great backgrounds! How long do you spend on a background?
I'm coming round more to doing my backgrounds in AS. I was using another package but I think I'm just so used to AS I can do them faster in that.

[Paul Mesken]

These backgrounds look really great. You got a good feel for color, mood, composition and texture. I've looked at your other backgrounds on DeviantArt as well and they are great. You show that you're capable of using different styles and even use more abstract backgrounds. I think you really got something good going here.

But there's something wrong with every single one of them : perspective.

You give each object in your backgrounds their own set of vanishing points.

Take this one for example : http://parkerx87.deviantart.com/gallery/#/d2g3icb

There are 3 paths leading to the 3 doors. These paths are, of course, running parallel to each other.

Lines that are parallel in the real world should have the same vanishing point in the picture when drawn in perspective.

But you have given each path its own vanishing point. If you would make the lawn bigger then the lines would even cross! Which is impossible because in the real world they run parallel to each other. They would never cross.

This is how they should run (I've chosen the vanishing point of the path in the middle) :



Note how the lines all go through that same vanishing point in the middle. I've chosen this background because it's shows most clearly where you go wrong with perspective. But it goes for all of your backgrounds that use perspective. In some backgrounds it doesn't matter that much, in some it is hardly noticeable and in others it is blatanly obvious.

Your backgrounds look very beautifull, they deserve proper perspective.

There are tons of webpages out there that teach perspective. The "parallel lines in the real world have the same vanishing point in the picture" is just one of several rules for perspective. There are several types of perspective (1, 2, 3 point, spherical, etc.). And it takes a bit of practice to use these rules properly (drawing circles in perspective, drawing a winding road over hills, etc) and to know when to bend the rules a little bit (the infamous "telegraph pole in the middle" is a good example of when the rules should be bend).

It's imperative to have proper perspective in backgrounds. A picture with flimsy perspective might still look beautifull but as soon as any animation takes place in it then the animator will be in deep troubles because a character walking through a background with faulty perspective will seem to float half the time.

[PARKER]

Just a background i made in anime studio in different styles.

They all look good, but I think the last one looks the best. The shoe is a nice touch

You drew this in AS?

~ Lindsay

Yes i draw all this in AS.

[PARKER]

Great backgrounds! How long do you spend on a background?
I'm coming round more to doing my backgrounds in AS. I was using another package but I think I'm just so used to AS I can do them faster in that.

Lately its taking me too much, i took me more than a day to do this one, my PC is too slow i think its not suitable for this kind of works.

[PARKER]

These backgrounds look really great. You got a good feel for color, mood, composition and texture. I've looked at your other backgrounds on DeviantArt as well and they are great. You show that you're capable of using different styles and even use more abstract backgrounds. I think you really got something good going here....

Thanks for your kind words Paul, and yes your totally right about the perspective, i definitly have to improve on that .

[tonym]

The wacky perspective is my favorite part.

[slowtiger]

About perspective: of course Paul is only right as long as the pathways are intended to be parallel - but they could as well meet!

To avoid this kind of problem lots of animation uses a style which deliberately fucks up perspective. But often this only looks odd and amateurish. Another attempt is to avoid straight lines as much as possible, in favour of curvy paths and a hilly/bumpy ground.

I'm quite impressed by the first example, it shows what's possible to achieve just in AS with textures and stuff. But still the BGs have the problem that the elements tend to float around. This is especially visible where the boardwalks meet the streets. In a bitmap program I would add shadows and dirt at the gutters.

This is why I do my BGs in a bitmap software, it's much faster for this style.

[Paul Mesken]

To avoid this kind of problem lots of animation uses a style which deliberately fucks up perspective. But often this only looks odd and amateurish. Another attempt is to avoid straight lines as much as possible, in favour of curvy paths and a hilly/bumpy ground.

Yes, a lot of nowadays animation seems to take huge liberties with things like perspective. They are soaked in style just to draw attention away from the fact that the artists can't handle something like perspective. Both Richard Williams in the "Animator's Survival Kit" and the Disney book "Illusion of Life" stress the importance of Solid Drawing. And perspective is part of that.

There are, of course, more ways to map spatial relationships of a scene into corresponding relations in a picture. John Willats wrote a nice book about that : "Art and Representation". There are the different kinds of perspective, oblique, orthogonal projections and topological systems which are used to make explicit where something is in the picture. One is not obliged to use perspective, I would love to see an isometrical animation (I loved those isometrical video games of the early 80s).

It doesn't really matter which system is used as long as there is a clear system which is used, and used consistently. Otherwise it would be like reading a story in which half of what is written is illegible. It doesn't matter how good the story is in such a case. The reader will no longer be immersed in the story but, instead, wonder why it's written so badly.

Mastery of perspective is a must-have. And I really think Parker's wonderful backgrounds need to be taken to the next level with it. He already got good composition, colors and texture. It's time to add perspective to it as well.

As for nowadays animation, there's another thing that is part of solid drawing but notoriously absent in a lot of animation : proper drawing of hands. The hands are either drawn so small that no detail can be discerned or they are just a couple of flat looking, over stylized "stock hands". Last night I watched a whole bunch of Transformers movies (the old 80s series). Although it's clear that this was hastily made animation, every single hand was spot on. They had volume, foreshortening, they really grabbed stuff and they were animated correctly. Even though these animators worked at break neck speed to crank out lots of G.I.Joe's, Transformers and Inhumanoids and all that, it was clear that they were darn good artists and had strong solid drawing skills.

By the way, SlowTiger : I'm sorry that Germany didn't make it to the finals. I really hoped for Germany vs Holland. We haven't forgotten about 1974, you know

[slowtiger]

Paul: You wouldn't say that if you had to live here - I'm really fed up with vuvuzelas and "Schlaaaaand!" and "Sieg Heil" on the streets every night. I'm glad it's (nearly) over. But thx anyway! Wish your team all the best!

Your comment about Filmation is the first positive one I've ever read. On John Kricfalusi's blog it's always mentioned as worst of animation ever. OTOH John has the same feelings about serious draftsmanship and the misuse of wrong perspective as an excuse for "style".

[tonym]

Linear perspective can make a background appear unimaginative.

I think that's why so many animators shun perspective. They would rather their backgrounds appear creative than technically precise.

[Paul Mesken]

Linear perspective can make a background appear unimaginative.

I think that's why so many animators shun perspective. They would rather their backgrounds appear creative than technically precise.

Yes, application of linear perspective can make really boring pictures, when taken to extremes. There are lots of Renaissance paintings (when linear perspective really became popular) which are a technical tour de force but are completely uninteresting to look at.

No painting or drawing should ever be about perspective. Few things are as boring as giving the "nuts and bolts" aspect center stage.

But herein lies the rub : if perspective is way off then it will get center stage. Even people who don't have a trained eye will feel that there's something odd going on. It will draw attention away from what is really important : action, emotion, etc. And all because a technical thing wasn't done right.

It's like lighting in movies. A movie should never be about lights. But if the lighting isn't done well then everything will be too dark, or too light, or there won't be a good seperation between characters and background, or attention will be drawn to the wrong places, etc. When lighting is done right then it will not only produce a clear picture, it will also support the aesthetics.

It's the same with perspective. Perspective can make something more dramatic, more threatening, or more mundane. How can you draw a towering dragon if you can't draw a dragon from below, looking up? It's perspective that can sell things like size.

And why shun away from something like perspective? Of all the things, it's the easiest. It can be learned from a book, done with a ruler and can even be calculated if one wants to. It doesn't take hundreds of drawings to master. It's easy.

Yes, perspective is boring. And there should always be a trade off between expression and technical precision. But one cannot make that trade off when one doesn't have mastery of the technical side.