Colour

Now that I'm happy with the movements of my animation, I'm ready to start colouring it.

When I coloured the squirrel, I used a picture as reference online, and noticed the different shades in the fur.

Because of the style I am using, I decided to narrow down the shades and make it as basic as possible, since he will be moving so fast anyway! I think the outlines help define the shapes properly (this goes for all my drawings!) since the background is as bright as the characters. Using different types of strokes for the tail I think helps show the different textures of the animal, since the tail is a lot fluffier then the rest of him.

For the human, I firstly had to decide on the skin colour. I thought a paler colour would be better for standing out on all backgrounds, so I just had to experiment with how pale:

Experiments for the skin of my human

Once I had coloured him in, he needed a colourful shirt. All the colours I have used have to stand out on all backgrounds, including the green grass in the first scene. I decided a dark red was quite opposite of green and blue, and generally a nice colour for a jumper.

Experiments for the colour of my guy's jumper

The last major thing I had to colour was my dog. I wasn't sure which would be best in contrast with the backgrounds so I looked it up on google and found lots of dogs with similar colours to this:

Using that as a basis, I experimented with different brushes on Photoshop to decide which would give me the best texture for the dog.

I decided a standard painted effect would look best, because based on my camera angles I can use just one block colour throughout.