Process notes · Illustration and animation

The Beach Behind Curtains

Glowing fish stranded on a beach on the other side of the curtains.

This piece is the background for a new animation. Its part of the same world as the previous one with the boy approaching the curtains. My idea is that on the other side of the curtains there’s a beach. The fish are glowing and scattered across the pebbles, as though the tide has pulled out too fast and left them there.

In my mind the curtain represents a sort of portal, and crossing through it brings the character into a world with a magical, dreamlike quality. The mark making and colours needed to reflect this. I was very inspired by Klimt’s work, as well as contemporary painters like Andrey Surnov, who find an interesting balance between graphic, symbolic imagery and realism.

Sketch and layout

I started by making a digital sketch to test out the general approach: a very low-stakes way to play around and figure out what works on a rudimentary level.

Working out the approach

Dark digital sketch of a pebble beach at night, with glowing fish, driftwood, green plants in the foreground and a bicycle at the water’s edge

The digital sketch

Next came deciding what actually belonged in the image and how to arrange it properly: the plants, rocks, driftwood and glowing fish.

The next stage was drawing the layout on watercolour paper. I just used graphite, and made sure to scan the finished drawing before any watercolour went on. The smallest rocks were left out to be added later; working at A4 size, adding them by hand wouldn’t have been practical.

Graphite drawing on watercolour paper of fish, pebbles, a piece of driftwood and leafy plants, without the smallest stones

The graphite layout, scanned before painting

Drawing the layout

Painting

The painting is mostly wet into wet, built up in multiple layers. There’s an uncontrollable element to watercolour which I really like.

Watercolour, wet into wet

Painting the rocks

Once the painting was dry, charcoal and colour pencils went on top to push the values further and refine things. A lot can also be altered in Photoshop later if anything goes wrong, and the painting gets scanned several times during the process, just in case.

Outlining

Charcoal and colour pencil

Photoshop

After the final traditional piece is scanned, it goes into Photoshop for some adjustments: usually the levels, the clone stamp to tidy certain areas up, and the scan of the linework laid back over the painting. Setting the linework scan’s blend mode to Multiply gives a bit more control over the darkness of the lines in the final image.

Scan of the finished watercolour: glowing orange and pink fish among coloured pebbles, driftwood and green leaves on a brown ground

The scanned painting

Adding the smallest pebbles

In Photoshop, I added all the smaller pebbles between the hand-painted ones. The aim was an interesting balance between the size, shape and value of the different pebbles, with colours that create a sort of vibrating texture when viewed from further away, but still clearly read as pebbles. There are also some brighter spots around the fish, as though the light coming from them is being reflected in the pebbles.

Working on the fish in Photoshop

The waves

The next thing was to design and animate the waves. This took a long time, and animating the foam patterns was particularly difficult. I used After Effects to keyframe the foam pulling back into the sea so I wouldn’t have to redraw the pattern several more times, but the vast majority of the loop is hand drawn in Harmony.

Linework for the wave loop

Originally, I wanted the sea to recede completely to black, but some tests compositing in a sky from a previous illustration changed that. Both were made with a similar technique, so it integrated well, and with some colour adjustments I liked how it looked. Apart from the sky, that illustration isn’t one of my favourites, so it was nice to repurpose it.

Earlier illustration of a dark green landscape at dusk under heavy blue-grey clouds, with a band of yellow light along the horizon

The earlier illustration the sky came from

The border

The border was an idea I had later, as a way to weave some imagery from the previous animations into the piece. It started in exactly the same way as the main painting, with graphite, then watercolour and some colour pencil. Ivan Bilibin was the main inspiration.

The painted border in deep orange, teal and dark green, with an empty cream centre

The border, in graphite and then watercolour

Laying the pencil scan over the border on Multiply

After some more adjustment in Photoshop, this was the result. You can see above the trick where you multiply the linework scan back over the painting for more control.

The illustration and animation for this piece took over a month to complete.

The finished illustration: the night beach with glowing fish, a bicycle at the shoreline and a band of light under dark clouds, inside the painted border

The finished piece

The full animation and some more details of this image are coming soon!