Bloom's Fortress

Development blog for my Camberwell BA Illustration personal project, an interactive graphic novel for the iPad produced in collaboration with Tim Crook (developer) and Neil Clarke (writer) Lindsay's portfolio - Lindsay's tumblr - Tim's portfolio - Tim's tumblr - Neil's tumblr

[snoozeonthemoss]

It's finally finished! Now that it's all done, here's the video of the making of Bloom's Fortress: The Emerald Bell, Volume I.

[lindsayjhaynes]

Here’s a quick photo from my phone of my Bloom’s Fortress display all set up for the summer exhibition. Pretty exciting to see everyone else’s work going up around it, too.

I’ll take some better pictures when the show opens!

[snoozeonthemoss]

Nighttime houses.

[snoozeonthemoss]

A new animation I made. I only recently started trying to use Photoshop to use animations, but I'm pretty pleased with how it's working out. I applied textures to each frame to make the eyes flicker slightly - still trying to get the glow perfect, but we can apply a glow effect in Unity anyway so I guess we'll try that and see what looks better.

[snoozeonthemoss]

Developing a typeface and animated text for the app. The typeface will be used for all the speech bubbles, with the text generated dynamically.

[snoozeonthemossdev]

Layering up the Fortress…

[snoozeonthemoss]

The last post and this one are a little update on the technical side of the project that Tim is working on. I draw my art in layers so that Tim can pull the layers apart and apply them to 3D planes in Unity. The leaves can then be added at different depths. This page has leaves that are loaded in dynamically and move in the wind. There are also little dust motes that fade in and out in the light!

[snoozeonthemossdev]

Playing around with dynamic foliage placement.

[snoozeonthemoss]

The fortress starting to come to life!

[snoozeonthemoss]

Starting off the week by colouring some pages. This is the final version of the fortress (without the tree it's attached to, obviously!) I used Kyle T. Webster's watercolour photoshop brushes, which I bought recently and am already using for everything. I also used overlaid scanned textures, though, partly to give everything a similar hue, and for extra grain.

The reference image for the treehouse itself was from a folder of images of treehouses I had, the main one I used as inspiration previously had no attribution (I found it on some blog post like 'the world's greatest tree houses'), but thanks to Google's search by image function have tracked it down - it's from the cover of this book, The Treehouse Book by Peter and Judy Nelson, which I shall now almost certainly have to purchase.

[snoozeonthemoss]

A rough sketch of the fortress.

[snoozeonthemoss]

Monster.

[snoozeonthemoss]

I drew a rough map of Snooze-on-the-Moss to get my bearings for where everything would be when I'm drawing scenery. My favourite bits are Smallhope Cove (from my endless lists of great British surnames), and 'Sharp Point'

Once I'd drawn it, it kind of reminded me of David Lynch's hand-drawn map of Twin Peaks which I saw in a book years back. Unintentional but a happy coincidence.

Josie's house is near the harbour because of her dad being a fisherman.. And Ayo lives with his grandparents in a somewhat remote cottage near Sharp Point.

[kevindart]

The Utonium House - Throughout the Day - Backgrounds from the Powerpuff Girls Special “Dance Pantsed”

Timelapse wizardry by Stephane Coedel

[snoozeonthemoss]

I'd like to perhaps do something similar to this with one of the kids' houses - different lighting states for different times of day.

[snoozeonthemoss]

Character sketch of the Queen of the netherworld.

Description by Neil from the script:

"The lights in the chamber come up as Westerby enters (flaming torches on the walls which burst into life?): now the queen is properly visible: she has a wizened, desiccated, bandaged body (sort of like a female Gollum), visible inside an almost-robotic (steampunkish) hollow copper suit of armour [...] Her head [and crown] is in an oversized spherical glass helmet with diagonal riveted seam, which is full of liquid, with trailing pipes plumbed into the wall behind her. The green glow of the crown lights her head and makes the life-support liquid glow."

[snoozeonthemossdev]

Tomato Can Blues

Charlie Rowan was a small-time cage fighter in rural Michigan who couldn’t get a break. He owed money to impatient people. He needed to start over, but didn’t know how. Then, he came up with a plan.

Nice simple animation from motion on layers.

[snoozeonthemoss]

The simplicity of this effect is excellent. It genuinely gives the feel of an animation but only requires two or three layers in the image.

[snoozeonthemoss]

In this panel I've used the 'soft light' blending method mentioned in one of my previous posts to create the torch beam and the light shining on the kids' faces.

Additionally, by drawing the trees on separate layers I have been able to blur the trees at different depths by different amounts, giving a subtle 'depth of field' focussing effect.

Several layers of light and dark gradients give the effect of shadows and mist.

[snoozeonthemoss]

sketches of one of the monsters

[snoozeonthemoss]

Using a light colour and the 'soft light' blend mode in photoshop to paint light into a dark scene.