Studio Tour – Background Artist Introduction Hi! I'm Joy, the Background Artist. It's my job to paint or render all the backgrounds for Lightbox Animation Studio. You will often see the background referred to by the initials BG for background. Ian, the Layout Artist, designs the background, while my job is to give the background life by adding colour, tones and lighting to create various moods and emotions. Sometimes this involves painting detailed backgrounds for a long camera pan. At other times a simple, flat, 4-colour digital image is all that's required. When painting backgrounds by hand I use art board, which is a type of thick cardboard with a prepared surface. These days, with traditional methods being replaced by computer software, Trina, the Art Director, often asks for digitally painted backgrounds. A good background artist must have strong fine art skills - in particular painting - with the ability to work in a wide range of media such as paint, markers, pencils and pastels. They must be good at creating textures and know how light hits objects made from different materials. They need a clear understanding of perspective, dimension, scale and how colour affects these dynamics. Knowledge of colours and colour relationships is vital. It helps to have a thorough knowledge of the animation process so that you can avoid creating problems for other departments. Today computer graphic and drawing skills are a must as much of this work is produced or amended using a computer. It's crucial to work effectively with others and meet deadlines. Without a background, an animated sequence cannot be filmed or composited. Here's where the background artist fits into the animation process.

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Studio Tour – Background Artist

Background Layouts The layout artist produces several drawings for each scene. One of them is the Background Layout. It is usually marked with the letters BG between the first peg holes. This layout is also marked in red with the word original. The original is photocopied for distribution to the other departments via the scene folder. The copies are re-pegged so that they align with the original. I use this copy to trace onto tracing paper, which is then transferred to the art board ready for painting. Below is a scanned version of a background layout from Rex and Clyde's big adventure.

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Studio Tour – Background Artist

Background layout

On the layouts the layout artist usually gives an indication of the directio n of the light source by drawing a three dimensional arrow on the background layout showing the general direction of the major light source. Tonal layouts are special layouts produced by the layout artist for feature films. They are usually produced using blue pencils and are highly rendered versions of the background layout that effectively shows where light does and doesn't fall on the background elements, and to what degree. This leaves no room for error by the background artist. Painting on Art Board I use tracing paper to transfer the background drawn by Ian, the Layout Artist, to the art board. I place the reverse side of the layout onto the Lightbox and on top I place a sheet of tracing paper that has peg holes punched in it. I use a soft 4b pencil to trace out the background on the tracing paper. Then I reverse the tracing paper and place it on top of the art board, which should also have the peg holes punched in it. By tracing over the lines drawn on the reverse side of the tracing paper I can transfer the background layout to the art board ready for painting. There are many types of art board that you can use for backgrounds. I find that a thicker art board such as Bainbridge board works well. The board is designed to take paints without buckling or warping. This becomes important during filming, as you do not want the board to lift off the table causing the cel to buckle or warp. It also makes them more durable so that they can be used in multiple scenes and then combined with art cels for sale. Bainbridge also allows the colours to be applied without bleeding. Like many specialized art boards you have greater control over the way the paint adheres and moves on the surface, which means greater accuracy in the artwork.

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Studio Tour – Background Artist

Cel over background painted on art board

Tools Many of the tools I use to produce the final coloured backgrounds are those of the traditional artist. I use a range of different paints and brushes to achieve different styles of rendering as necessary. My favourite paint is acrylics, as they have a thickness of cover but don't dry thick like oils. Sometimes I also use watercolours when a production or particular scene calls for a softer feel. Unlike the cel painters I need a wide range of brush widths, from very fine to wide cover brushes. An airbrush is a tool that uses compressed air to shoot a fine spray of paint onto the artboard surface. It can produce fine gradations of colour, allowing me to produce paintings such as: •

a twilight sky that goes from dark blue to light blue;

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highlights on floors and furniture; or

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misty forests.

Frisk is a type of adhesive plastic sheet that can be cut into various shapes and used to mask areas so that the airbrush can be applied to one area at a time. The airbrush is an essential tool for producing highly rendered backgrounds on art board. Computer packages can mimic the effects of an airbrush using software tools. Many animation houses use a digital painting software system to produce backgrounds inside the computer.

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Studio Tour – Background Artist Computer Paint Programs Today computer paint programs usually play some part in the background process. In some studios the layout is scanned directly into the computer and coloured up to look like a hand painted background using a tablet and pen and a paint program. Filters can be applied to the final computer generated artwork to make it look as though it has a paper texture just like a hand painted traditional background. If the backgrounds have been produced using traditional painting on board techniques but are likely to be combined with digital animation, they will be scanned into a computer. Before they are composited with the animation, the backgrounds can be colour corrected with the computer paint program. If there are any mistakes found after the background has been finished the computer program can be used to fix some problems, which saves a lot of time.

Digitally coloured background with paper texture filter applied

Colour Script The colour script is like an animatic but it is made from the colour thumbnails. These thumbnails are small paintings no bigger than 4 inches by 3 inches (10 cm by 8 cm) that outline the colour treatment for a scene. Trina, the Art Director, provides colour thumbnails on feature films and high budget projects. This is not done because the art director doesn't trust me to paint a scene with the right colours but so that they can check the continuity between the scenes as a whole. It also serves to check that the colours for the background won't clash with the colours of the characters.

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Studio Tour – Background Artist Viewing the colour script is the best way to check for continuity between scenes and sequences. It is good practice to keep colours different between major sequences but similar between scenes from the same sequence. For example, if some characters are hiding out in a basement for one sequence and then in the next sequence we see other characters, as they are lost in the desert, the colour treatment and the colours used should differ greatly. In the basement scenes the colours will be tinted with shades of blue and the saturations will be low. All colours in the basement be they red or yellows, should be muted. In the desert scene the sky will be bright blue and the sand bright yellows and whites. This stark contrast between the colour treatments of sequences helps the audience to easily understand that the location has changed. I always view the colour script to get the overall picture before starting a sequence of backgrounds. Common Techniques Pool of light is a technique for directing the viewer's attention to the area on the screen in which the major action will take place. Essentially you can create a pool of light effect by graduating the colours from lighter and more vivid towards the darker and less saturated in the outer areas. The viewer will be more likely to focus their attention on the area that is light and vivid, that has a pool of light effect. This is where the main action will happen.

A pool of light directs the viewer's attention to a particular area Creating textures is an important part of my job. I use brush-painting techniques to place dark and light variations of the same colours to create textured effects. This texturing actually makes an object look more natural than any even gradient of colours would. Except for things such as

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Studio Tour – Background Artist skies and highly reflective surfaces, having textures and imperfections actually makes a surface look more natural. This is why texturing is so important to 3D animation. It is the imperfections of a texture that makes an object look realistic. Another technique is muting related colours - using colours with related values when I wish to blend background objects into each other. This is done so that they don't overpower the characters. If a background contains many objects such as a kitchen scene with pots, pans, boxes and jars of food, then the objects can become distracting to the viewer and could steal their attention from the most important thing in the scene, which is the character. To stop this from happening I use colours of related values so that they visually merge and the audience gets the sense of them being there without them becoming the focus. Here are some Useful Web Sites that you might like to check out.

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