Adding some depth

I tried a slightly more close up background. I still want to try putting characters in in as well. I added a blur to sections towards the front and some at the very back to add a bit of depth.

First proper kinda background

I altered the cut out or copic marker work on photoshop on. In the second image i changed the hues slightly to give a deeper colour and a slightly more space age colour pallet.

I drew a few pieces for a garden scene. I wanted something completely different to this. Wanted a more close up background of the garden that I could put the characters into. However i like this one as it gives a broad overview of the possible environment which is useful to have.

Cyber women!

Heres some colour tests. The scanner in uni is acting up as ever so theses are the only ones I can post for now. I kept drawing the cyber goth character with goggles on her head as it seems to be a staple part of that look. I'm not sure they are actually practical but I thought I should try and see how they would look on the face. I have mixed feelings about this sketch as. I think putting the goggles on the face and obscuring the eyes takes a lot away from the character, but its nice to have the option for some in situs. I also tried different ways of putting line on the characters other than the thick black I usually use. I have experimented with mixing inks with copic markers. I quite like the more subtle result.

Character Design

I heve sheets and sheets of the stuff now. I can't upload all of them but I think these give an idea of where the characters are going. I focused on the beginning of the project on the robot/mother character because I thought that was a quirky idea for the show so I wanted to get visuals for that idea as soon as possibles so people could see where I wanted the project to go. I started work on the other charcters. There is a dad, twins (one girls and a boy)and their older sister who acts like a baby sitter. The kids are fairly boisterous and have a lot of energy so I need designs to reflect that and also they have the ability to be very endearing, which is what gets them out of trouble a lot. The dad is a fairly typical middle aged man whos tired and run down by work. The last character is the oldest daughter, a sullen teenager. Like most teenagers she has a style that reflects a teenage fad. In this case Cyber goth. I picked this as a point of reference as it is a futuristic style that already exists and so I can study it. Coloured examples coming soon :)

Lollipop Schools

I haven't posted on the blog for a few days. I've been up super late tonight working on character designs. Hopefully I can have some of them scanned in uni tomorrow and posted too. In the mean time I remembered the school designs I made last week. I was basing them on lollipop and bubble gum machines because I wanted them to feel quite childish and fun, one of the ways they get kids exited about going to school in the future, I guess its a form of subliminal messaging. One of them resembles a female body shape when turned upside down (the light pink pencil sketch) I like the idea of this being the basis for the shopping mall.

Planets!

I have so many planets now! thirty three to be exact.With a bit of photoshop manipulation wizardry I could have twice that. In any case its enough for the long pan background Matt suggested. I did so many because I didn't want it to repeat at all because that would look lazy. However, I can adjust the hues to produce new colours which could look nice to. I have pushed the colours slightly in photoshop to make them slightly more vivid from the original cutouts. They lost some colour during the scanning process.

Speedy backgrounds

These are mixed media pieces I did fairly quickly to get an idea of how the universe I want to create will look. I talked to Graham and he had the idea of basing the structure on an atom. So I started looking up the geometry of covalent bonds. All the individual planets are connected by tubes (it it was a covalent structure these would be the bonds) I like the idea, I think it ties the world together. The next step is to try a much larger panning shot that shows different depths. The planets are traditional made cut outs, the tubes are vector images made in flash and the sky is photoshop.