The development of a layout

I really liked layout class this year. Piotr Bielicki has been really inspiring and has really solidified in my head the fact that I want to be involved in either story or layout when I get out of this crazy thing I've gotten involved in (a.k.a Sheridan).

I just wanted to show the work I put in to finish a final layout. On this particular one I went through the thumbnail storyboard, 6 roughs, one clean line, and one marker rendering to arrive at my final layout.



The first one is literally just basic shapes and basic perspective, the idea is to point toward one central focus point in the image. I make notes to myself at this point and the drawing's all very rough - I try to keep loose as long as possible and not rush to the final image - which creates more mistakes.



The second image I start tying the detail down on the buildings, and fix the background to something more appropriate. I felt the clouds were a little 'too much' of a one directional thing and it basically hurt the eye.



The third image I started going with a curvilinear thing on the right and the left, with the foreground element on the right being its own seperate entity.



This image I start really nailing the lines the down, with the detail becoming more clear to me.



At this point I thought it was the final image when I started (hence the cleaner line on the rooftop of the building on the left) but I started making scale mistakes so I decided to keep loose and rough out the detail, only better this time.




This final rough is basically a loose version of the final. I moved the building on the right over so it would frame the character and keep him a tad more subtle. I also made the scale work a little better and made the detail a little clearer overall. Robin said she liked this better than the final clean line version.



Here's the clean lineart. I didn't do the text and the framed character, as this was just a trace off for the rendering. The assignment called for each element on it's own individual layer, so the character appears on that.



And the final marker rendering.

Yes, I realize I'm stupid. But I like layout.

Gonna go to sleep now, got the group film screenings to go to earlyish tomorrow!