Messy 3

Grease Pencil

Experimental: Messy 3 Grease Pencil from Thalia McWatt on Vimeo.

Oil Pastel 

Experimental: Messy 3 Oil Pastel from Thalia McWatt on Vimeo.

This was my final week of oil pastel animation tests. I used the same materials and lighting setup as my previous tests so the experimentation was focused on how best to use the pastels to create the animation style I wanted.

In my work on Messy 2.5 I was having trouble getting the pastel to hold onto the hard, flexible plastic, so I thought, "well maybe it will stick better if I have something harder I can push into."

thus, glass!

This worked out terribly.

The oil pastel just wouldn't adhere to the glass at all.

After realising the initial test was doomed to failure I decided to just run a new animation test with a grease pencil to see how that looked. The movement wasn't very planned out so the animation doesn't have any gravity to it, but I can see how the grease pencil might come in handy for future work.

My next thought was to get some really soft plastic sheets to work with. If hard makes things worse then surely soft will make things better?

This was sound logic. 

I love how the final result looks and the oil pastel took to the plastic really easily. This whole time I've been looking for a way to achieve this aesthetic without the physical work being to much of a burden on my hands and this was the closest I've gotten to a quick, easy style. In this test I would scratch away at the edges of the pastel while working in a new layer of colour (mostly white) on top of the existing oil pastel. I'm very satisfied with the result, but I also recognise that I need to think about how I'm going to composit this type of work into larger scenes.

As for what comes next, I expect to start experimenting with paper puppets and compositing in After Effects this week.