Behind: Everyday Feels Like Summer with You
Breaking down my process in creating my short series about a girl and her dog going on summer adventure.
First Blog Post!
Hello, welcome to my first blog post!
Let’s make this introduction snappy:
Welcome to Sunny Side Megg, a space I’m using to document my creative process and pour my love for new illustrations and motion design pieces! I’ll also be sharing all the lessons I am learning as an artist, in hopes that anyone that stumbles on here can find this resourceful while navigating their own journey as an artist.
So let’s get crankin’ (I am trying to make an egg pun, I hope it’ll catch on in the future)
Behind:
Everyday Feels Like Summer With You:
A series dedicated to the summer adventures I embark on with Alpha, my 11-year old husky.
The Idea
How did I come about devoting my summer to a series
about a girl and her dog?
I developed this idea after summer 2020, where at times my only outing was walking my dog, due to the limitations of lockdowns. I’ve always wanted to capture the joy of spending time with Alpha. What to me is a break away from the screen and a chance to get out, to him is an adventure that he never fails to be excited for.
So, I ran with the idea and started conceptualizing how I would best approach this series.
But, before we get there, I should also point out the title, Everyday Feels Like Summer With You, is a direct reference to Feels Like Summer by Tim Wheeler, from the Shaun the Sheep Movie soundtrack (Which I must say is one of the BEST movies ever if you haven’t already checked it out)
Conceptualization and Design
References for my 5th piece of VizRef
(I spy Alpha and I)
My conceptualization and design process took place mainly on Procreate. I started my process with an outline of how many pieces I will be creating for this series and answering the question, whether this series has some sort of a narrative or can they be stand-alone pieces.
This is what I came up with:
5 pieces of work and a very loose narrative!
After that, I started collecting references for style, compositions, and other summer pieces that could spark inspiration before I begin my sketch! My sister recommended the app, VizRef, its fantastic for keeping all my references sorted out on one page, I highly recommend it!
Now, I can begin sketching my first piece and went forward in the workflow where I’d complete each piece from start to finish one at a time.
Lesson/Reflection:
Looking back at this series, I would have made the sketches for all my pieces first, this could have solidified my style and helped everything feel more cohesive.. On the other hand, it was also nice to see my style change over time that was more prominent since I was drawing the same subject repeatedly (subject aka Alpha)
Here are a couple of the sketches from my piece at various stages!
Fun Fact: Some of the pieces where created on my train rides travelling across provinces. There’s nothing like sitting in a train for 5 hours with just you and your iPad.
References
A little bonus, here are some reference pictures that I took myself (and proof yes, Alpha is basically the same size as me.)
Let’s get colouring!
I wanted the narrative of a “summer day, morning to evening” to come through subtly with my colours. We start with our very hot summer day until we progress to our cool evening sunset where we say goodbye to summer.
Colour palette for each piece. The palette gradually becomes softer by the the final piece.
Once the design for my frames was done I moved on to juice - animation time.
Animation (and Rendering - I’ll throw this one in there)
Alright, let's get moving! Okay fewer words and more visuals because I think that will explain this part of my process better (I promise it is not because I am tired of writing and fear that nobody would make it to the end of this blog post if I write even more. But, if you made it this far - you rock.)
First, of all, it’s important to note that I already had the animation for these pieces in mind during the conceptualization and design stage. It was easy to get an idea of what layers I would need to break down and/or recreate as shape layers on After Effects
For pieces that included frame-by-frame animation, I created them on RoughAnimator, brought the png sequence in, and cleaned it up on After Effects.
In the last piece, I broke down the flowers on illustrator, knowing that a huge chunk of the animation - although subtle - would be their gently sway before revealing the girl and her dog.
We’re almost done!
I just want to dedicate some time talking about reading, because let me tell you, Instagram will drop the quality if it is not rendered to its liking. I had a whole separate account just to do render tests for different Mbps, aspect ratios, and length of the loop.
So here’s a render summary:
H.264 codec
1080 by 1080
<15MB
I can dedicate a whole post on rendering and how to set up your project because it was a journey for my nitpicky self.
Hello Autumn!
Once all my pieces were completed, rendered, and posted, well the series was complete and now I welcome autumn and the adventures it’ll bring for Alpha and me. Thanks so much for following through my process of Everyday Feels Like Summer With You. Creating this personal project was such a joy and was good practice and I’m looking forward to the next project.
For now, let’s get to our autumn content, but, this is definitely not the last time you’ll see this 11-year old husky appear in my pieces.
