THE SIMPSONS NEWS

Monday we managed to finish revising show 11 and I was asked to board show 10’s Couch Gag.  Once again, I’ve got a another crazy epic Couch Gag to do. It might as well be it’s own short film, it’s so long. This season is full of very long Couch Gags. Not sure why.

Tuesday I brought Dante to work with me. Our daycare was closed that day. Alesha took Elizabeth to work with her and baby Ambrose was taken care of by my brother-in-law.

Dante was a good boy overall. I had originally planed on dropping Dante off with my wife at noon, mostly because I thought he might be a handful. He behaved so well that I kept him and actually got work done too. I was very proud of him.

ART

(For those of you coming in late to these posts, if you want to read what my project is about, CLICK HERE to learn about the general world the story takes place in, and CLICK HERE if you want to know the story itself.)

Now that I have the drawing up on the computer, vectorized and inked, I started trying out style tests.

My first test was an attempt at a thick outline around the art.  I only got as far as the Sorcerers before I made up my mind that it was too much work and it didn’t look the way I wanted it too:

My next test was to add a black shadow to the drawing.  To be honest, I think I did a lousy job inking the drawing.  I put all the blacks in all the wrong spots. I should have blacked out the background instead of the characters.  Still. As lousy as it turned out, I found it very difficult to get the same effects I usually get with an actual brush.  I didn’t like the process much, so I decided I didn’t want to go in that direction anyway:

The test after that, was just to keep the lines I had and color the drawing.

At first, I was thinking I would use a self ink line, but then I didn’t want to re-ink the drawing all over again. I also realized that it would have been far more work than I really wanted to do.

I have very little experience with color and I had no idea where to begin.  I started coloring the drawing like I would have normally done it, namely, color everything the color it is.  The more I though about that though, the more I thought I needed to really think more holistic about it.  I thought, instead of using all the colors I could, I should limit my pallet and think about how the drawing should feel rather than the what color the sky is normally and what color apes are normally.

I decided to make the dominant color green.  Green was going to be the color of the Sorcerers. Why? Well it worked on Disney’s SLEEPING BEAUTY.

I thought green would work for a “strange magick” feel.

I’m planning to make red  Rob’s “I’m angry. It’s time for payback” color and blues and yellow where going to be the calm normal colors.  Since this particular drawing was dominated by the Sorcerers, I thought it should be green.

I started laying down the colors but I’m not done yet.  This is what I have so far:

What do you think?

By the way, all this work was done  using Storyboard Pro.

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