Step by Step

Here are the first two steps of my background design for 2D animation painting.

Step One: For the outlines I scan the design of my hand-drawn pencil sketch. I keep the different foregrounds, main part, and background elements on separate sheets of paper. This allows me to reuse and reassemble diverse parts to create new sceneries without having to repaint all the details.

Step Two: First I colour the basic parts in one plain colour, and keep a copy, before adding detail. This allows to change shadows or other corrections, if necessary, at later stages.