short short-Backgrounds

this is the final BG, as it came out after much experimentation.

Shortly after I was done with the animatic, I set out to create the backgrounds for 'madeleine'.

Now, I'm not a  BG specialist by any stretch and I had something very specific in mind, and that was part of the reason why it was a difficult birth...

I wanted something light with shapes and colours suggesting the set. On Violince I had gotten used to draw the backgrounds in quite a lot of details, which allowed me to add colours and shading rather easily, but I knew straight away that it wasn't gonna work.

For a couple of days, I experimented working in the computer with only a hint of layout, but no matter what I did, it never even came close to the image I had in my mind.

this is probably my best effort in the computer and I don't like it one bit...

But then I did the wise thing and went to ask for advice. the great thing about working in a studio is that there's always someone who knows better and can point you in the right direction. Pascal has been working at 352 almost from the beginning and he quickly pointed out to me that I should use big bold brush strokes to suggest the shapes (I was doing the exact opposite, trying to blend the shapes in order to get that light feeling...) 

I came back home and experimented with watercolours on paper, because no matter how good brushes have become in the softwares, it doesn't match the real thing. Below are some of the sketches I did, which then gave me the confidence to try for the real BG on a slightly bigger size.

In the end I'm quite happy with the result, which is not exactly like the image in my mind, but comes pretty close. But most importantly, I challenged myself to do something I didn't know (and was very uncomfortable with) and pulled through.