Anime Background Art - Japanese Anime Adventure 06/09/10

In the last part of my Japanese Anime Adventure, I talked about the process that I use to create characters in Anime Studio Pro 7 and showed you a short video of them in action. This time, I'm going to talk about the process that I used to create the background art for the same animation.

The method of creating anime background art that I describe here is my own personal one. It may not necessarily be the "right" way, or the quickest way, or the "best" way, but it's the way that works best for me. I really like the hand-painted backgrounds from classic anime and animated movies, so I've tried to recreate that feel, as best I can, in a digital way.

The first thing I do with a scene for my animation is create a quick storyboard sketch in pencil. By sheer chance, I discovered that a stack of old business cards that I have almost perfectly match the proportions of a 16:9 aspect ratio widescreen TV show or movie, so I now use these for my storyboard sketches. The good thing about creating a storyboard sketch on something the size of a business card is that you don't get bogged down in too much detail, you just capture the critical parts of the scene.

The next stage is to draw out the background in detail on a piece of paper. I use standard A4 size paper as it makes it easy to scan, but, since the dimensions aren't a 16:9 ratio, I draw a 16:9 rectangle in the centre to represent my camera. The area inside the rectangle should more or less capture the same area of background as I sketched on my storyboard card. However, I still draw in the extra background to fill the sheet so that I can pan the camera if I wish without running out of background.

As I mentioned earlier, I'm trying my best to create animation backgrounds in the classic, hand-painted style, so, once I've scanned my line drawing into my computer, I go into a painting program called ArtRage to colour it.

ArtRage simulates painting with a brush, so, although it may take longer than going into Photoshop and using a flood-fill, it gives a more authentic hand-painted look. To paint this particular background, I used ArtRage 2.5, which only has an oil painting brush rather than a watercolour brush (as used to hand-paint much of the classic animation background art). However, I now have ArtRage Studio Pro, which does have a watercolour brush.

Another good thing about ArtRage is that it allows me to paint on different layers, and has an "Export to Photoshop" function. Both of these things are vital for the next stage of the process. Once I'm in Photoshop, I can colour-correct each layer in turn to get a more authentic look to the complete background. This is useful to me as I'm not that good at choosing colours when I'm doing the initial painting. If you compare the background as it came out of ArtRage with the corrected one below, you'll see what I mean. You'll also notice that I decided to add a texture to make the road look more authentic too.

The final thing I do in Photoshop is ink neatly over my original scanned pencil lines. I choose to do this at the end as it also gives me the opportunity to clean up areas where I may have "painted over the lines" slightly. I draw the ink on top as a separate layer so it hides any rough edges on the painting. I also sometimes discover, as I did with the window frames here, that some areas look better without inked black lines. By adding the ink at the end, I have the freedom to experiment with these things.

The final stage of the process is to export the background art so that I can bring it into Anime Studio Pro. I do this by exporting it as PNG files. This is another reason why creating the background art as layers is useful. I export it as a series of PNG files, one for each level of depth I want. So, for example, the buildings might be on one layer, but the pavement and the canopy on another layer. This means that, in my final animation, I can have characters moving in front of one part of the background, but behind another part. It also means that I can create depth perspective effects when panning the camera, so that the pavement and canopy in the foreground move across the screen slightly faster than the shops at the back. This effect isn't totally noticable in the video, but you can perhaps just see it if you watch how the canopy support pillar moves in relation to the shop behind it.

The different depth layers of background art in this particular sample also allowed me to sandwich the rain effect between the foreground and background so that, realistically, the rain's falling on the road, but isn't falling on the pavement (as the canopy would be shielding it). Take a look at the video and you'll see what I mean.

One thing I did notice once I uploaded the video to YouTube was that it made the whole thing much darker. I don't know if this is because YouTube made the physical dimensions of the video smaller than the original Quicktime file or whether it's a result of the file compression process. All I know is that the brightness and colours looked fine in the original Quicktime video that was created by Anime Studio Pro. This is something I'll have to look into more as I create more animations.

That's all for now really. I hope you've enjoyed this little look at the way that I create background art for my animations. If you have any comments or better ideas then please email me and let me know, and don't forget to check for the next episode of my Japanese Anime Adventure soon.