This phase was huge in terms of work. This is the phase where storyboards were created, then refined into styleframes which doesn’t sound like a lot, but it was a lot.

One thing I learned about storyboards is you want to do all of your thumbnailing and exploration at this point. I think I didn’t do as much thumbnailing as I would’ve liked (mostly because of time). You pretty much want your storyboards to be the final styleframes but just without colour, texture etc. That way, you can avoid having to redo compositional or story elements when they’re more fleshed out.

Moving onto the styleframes I then had to spend more time refining the illustrations because I hadn’t resolved everything in the storyboard phase. I also had a lot of trouble with colour as you’ll see. I think I was putting a lot of pressure on myself to get the colours right because I was running out of time and it created almost like a creative block. When I spoke to my mentor he suggested collecting other people’s colour palettes and using that as a starting place. Usually what happens is that you change the colour palette anyways but it gives you a place to start that looks good and therefore makes you feel less stressed out. He also told me to just have fun with it. The next time I tried getting my colour palettes that’s exactly what I did. I told myself “for the next hour we’re just going to have fun”. That combined with starting with other people’s colour palettes was a huuuuuuge help and I will definitely be using both those techniques in the future.

Another thing I learned from my mentor was how to create textures. It’s a very simple technique where you take your scanned textures and make them into brushes. I’m sure everyone else already knew this but it was a huuuuuuge time saver which is super important on time intensive projects.

This phase was super challenging and I learned a lot. I’m pretty happy with what I created and I think I have a great foundation for my final piece.