Could you explain how to do lighting in landscapes?? I'm thinking specifically of how the heck they do it in Steven Universe. They have beautiful artwork and I'd love to be able to achieve that sort of lighting. Thanks!
Ah well lighting in animation backgrounds are done with the express purpose of guiding the eye to where the animation is going to take place - think of it like setting up spot lighting on a stage!
In fact, in a lot of cases the su team do literally set things up with what are essentially spotlights
Note that all of the characters are in areas where the light is shining. This is done because your eyes are drawn to the areas with the highest contrast, so your eyes jump to the spotlights - and by extension, the characters!
Now if i show you some backgrounds without the characters, can you guess where abouts the characters are on the stage?
Now the thing to understand about the lighting in these backgrounds is that there are some rules and guidelines that inform the colour choices and value ranges.
Scenery is divided into planes, the Foreground, Background, and the Middleground which is generally where the characters are staged.
In outdoor scenery there is also often Deep Space, which is things waaay off in the distance like mountains.
Take a look at this background for example:
This background has all of the different planes, you can flatten them each down into a solid colour
as i mention in the key there, the foreground is generally in contrast to the background and deep space.
If the background is full of cold blues and purples, the foreground is going to be warmer colours like browns and greens.
It’s also going to be on the opposite end of the value range - deep space is usually pale in colour and uses the higher end of the value range, whilst the foreground is usually darker and uses the lower end of the value range.
the colour of the sky is very important to the rest of the colour scheme! this is because of aerial perspective. It’s a simple enough concept, but it does need a little explaining
This is easiest to understand if you think of a really foggy day - you know how things get really hazy the further out in the fog they get?
This happens on regular days too! It’s just that it needs to be super far away for it to be noticeable.
So, basically, the further away something gets, the less contrast there will be and the colour will become closer to that of the sky.
The reason for this is because of the water in the atmosphere - the sun shines on it and it reflects the colour of the sky, which is particularly noticeable on foggy days due to there being so much water.
most of the time, this means that things in the distance will turn bluer, due to the sky normally being blue.
However! SU regularly takes place at different times of day, so you can see how the colour of the sky and how bright it is changes the aerial perspective
as for actually setting up the lighting, there are some simple rules to follow.
the area of highest contrast is where the viewer is going to look. To understand this better, look at the backgrounds in black and white only:
Your eyes are drawn to Beach Citywalk Fries because there is a stark contrast between the shadows and the spotlight!
It has the highest range of values going all the way through from black to white in the middleground.
The areas your eyes are not drawn to, however, only have a small range of values. The foreground goes from dark grey to black, and the background goes from light grey to white.
Generally, the foreground will be darker than the middleground, and the background will be lighter, whilst the middleground will have a full range of values.
I say generally as this is not always the case, there are lighting situations where the background will be the darkest part of the image
but they’re pretty unusual!
so in summary:
- figure out where you want the viewer to look, that should be the area of highest contrast. That means that there should be strong shadows and strong highlights.
- make use of aerial perspective to add depth to your scenery, the further away something is the less contrast it should have.
- Set your scenes up with the planes in mind, use the most values in the middleground and use opposite values for the foreground and background.
Disclaimer: Art isn’t a science: there are no definite proofs, there is no “correct” methodology, there are no facts. I’m just showing you what works for me.
OK, so we want to start animating a character. One of the most important things about characters are the faces. It can really throw off a perfectly good animation when you see the face deform into something you can’t even recognize. What we want is consistency, but how do we get that? Well I can think of three ways : Make face guidelines, generate a 3d animation and rotoscope it, or get a clip from real life and rotoscope that. I’m just going to focus on the first one for reasons I’ll explain later.
You should start with a rough sketch, I like using simple shapes, but a lot of pros just go straight into outlines of the major forms.
OK, we got a very basic construction of a head (eyes, mouth, neck, etc). Now to keep our parts of the head consistent relative to eachother, we can add another guideline to help us (I used a triangle).
Now I made up some hairstyle and eyes on the first frame. Then I applied it on the other 3 keyframes and added inbetween frames to make it smoother.
You see how the eyes and mouth are within a certain boundary. This is really helpful to get it looking believable. Keeping the ratio is critical to make your character’s face consistent. Now remove the guidelines and you get a half-decent animation.
You can expand your animation to do whatever.
You can do all this relatively fast if you feel comfortable with drawing your characters.
You can also use 3d. The problem with 3d though is that it takes alot of time to get assets made, rigged, and animated. By then you might as well render it and keep it 3d. I should say, a lot of modern day 2d animations do use at least some 3d. I’ve noticed it a lot with backgrounds and that’s understandable since you don’t want to redraw every single frame as the camera pans.
As for rotoscoping, I think it’s a bit vacuous. Most of my favorite animations are done with exaggerated movements of different body parts to accentuate emotions (e.g. mouth getting bigger when angry or surprised). This problem applies to 3d as well, but if you’re skilled enough (and have enough time) you can make great animations that have this exaggerated element.
*This works for other “styles” that are more realistic.
The thing to keep in mind, is that the skull is a complex shape, and it follows that the face is also a complex shape. Having simple shapes still helps because those complex shapes fit inside simple shapes.
Hope this helps, and thanks again for your support.
hello i am here today to not lose track of the art cheats i have discovered over the years. what i call art cheat is actually a cool filter/coloring style/way to shade/etc. that singlehandedly makes art like 20 times better
my advice: have fun and play–play is learning | always be watching real life to see how things move | also be watching cool animations to learn from them | don’t wait until you’re ‘good at art’–animating will help you improve | it’s hard but so worth it when things turn out well, good luck!
