Curse of the Crimson Cloak

Friday, February 21, 2014

Character Designs: Maisie

More or less the same design as Maisie from the comic with a few exceptions; I increased the size of her iris in her eyes and simplified her eye-lashes.

First I block in the simple geometry of her body in blue, and then I clean up the line with black.

Then I scan the drawings and import them into Photoshop.

From there I make the image black and white by going to Image / Adjustments / Black & White.

Next I go to the levels and pull out all the gray.

A little digital ink and paint later....

...and we have a near finished modelsheet.

Wednesday, February 19, 2014

Please pardon us for the delay of updates, as we have been working diligently on them. Lots of stuff on the way: walk-cycles, backgrounds, conceptual designs, etc.

In other Crimson Cloak news, we will be launching a kickstarter campaign this June. Our aim is to raise enough money to produce an animated mini-series as well as a supplemental comic series.

Here are some examples of the gifts you can receive by donating to our kickstarter:

Friday, January 31, 2014

Background parallax and digital snow

Here is the first panel from the first page:

I separated the background into layers in Photoshop.

Stars

Moon

Trees

For the snow, I used nParticles in Autodesk Maya. They were rendered with default settings in mental ray and then composited in After Effects.

Snow

Adding them all up and we get this background parallax:

A blue overlay increases the coldness of the scene.

Once I had control of each layer, I could animate the parallax and create the illusion of depth.

Shot 1

Thursday, January 16, 2014

Conceptual Transfer, from comic to cartoon

Before we can begin the animation process, we must redesign the comic for the cartoon medium. We do this to streamline our production pipeline and to simplify an already complex project.

Below we have a panel from the original comic by Jesse Carson.

And here we have the redesigned concept for the animation.

Notice how the first thing to go is the beautiful use of chiaroscuro (the transitions between highlight and shadow). This is a necessary evil. Though we lose value in draftsmanship, we double our speed to produce finished frames. Rendering every frame with the same level of detail Jesse applied to his comic would take MUCH longer to produce.

Tuesday, January 7, 2014

Curse of the Crimson Cloak original comic

Below are the pages from the original comic created by Jesse Carson. The comic was first published in the Academy of Art University's quarterly anthology, Figments #6.