Process: Leafboat

Hey there,

Enough people have asked me how I got the effect with the this animation so I figured id write out something more permanent that people can reference.

This isn’t so much a tutorial as it is just my process at making Leafboat.

Photography

Took this picture while I was camping out by the Mississippi. Been wanting to do a project where I illustrate life inside of micro environments for a long while and I went into taking photos while camping to set this project up.

Illustration

Illustrated the environment in Photoshop. This started as a project to get closer to my older paintings by using my old tube watercolor palette as a digital palette as well. Not that people know much of what my old paintings look like, but they basically look like this but rougher.

Modeling

I took the illustration into blender because im lazy and wanted to light the scene without using my smooth brain. This as a process is probably more time consuming than sitting down and figuring out lighting by hand, especially for organic or complex environments but will be more time efficient with longer animations.

At this stage im setting up lighting values only. I don’t need things to be photorealistic, I need them to feel right under my watercolor. I could apply bump maps and do some serious modeling but then things will look busy once I start compositing stuff together.

Compositing

Went and composited everything in Photoshop because that’s where I do my hand animation. I would use blender but I need to transfer my Photoshop brushes over and have been putting it off for over a year.

my whole render that i worked on is the bottom layer of everything. see the build up below.

Post note

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It will update you with new products that I’m selling (only premade stuffs like shirts, cups, ect.) or with blogposts like this one.

I reminisce of painting

I sat down to draw because that’s all I do. Not really, but mostly that’s all I do. I put on Matt Pond PA because I haven’t heard his stuff in a while, and I realized that my memories of music no longer tie me back to places or people. They tie me back to paintings and specific things I’ve made.

How boring is that? Reminiscing about sitting in a room alone, slaving with some watercolors and too much salt.

In 10 years will I listen to sad jazz and think about the times I used to digitally paint watercolor to sad jazz? God, I hope not. Anyway, here is this thing I made today that is probably the best thing I’ve ever made in my entire life. I kind of want to make a digital children’s book around this.

Leaf Boat.

Mrs. rat lost her hat.