How It's Made: A Voice in the Woods - 2

Happy Tuesday! Here's this week's behind the scenes look segment "How It's Made" for A Voice in the Woods page 2.

Storyboard

As you can see for the backgrounds, more 3D. Once again the Yayoi shrine I made way back when is getting some more action. I like how I ended up rendering that. If you want a comparison here's the old image:

 

You can see some differences in rendering the shrine back when I first did it in 2013 versus today. Doing the wood paneling is actually much easier for me now than it was. The G-pen simulation in Manga Studio 5 makes it easy to do that kind of work whereas the round brush in Photoshop wasn't quite good enough. I think I remember the edges being kinda fuzzy and if I wanted more precision in the shapes I'd use the lasso tool and then paint fill from the drop down menu in Photoshop to get what I wanted. I think I like how I did the thatched roof the second (well, okay, third) go around at drawing the exterior of the shrine.

Pencils

Since the backgrounds are done using Blender, I only bothered to draw what was necessary for the characters. I used Manga Studio's perspective grids to help me with the bottom two frames. As you can see I got lazy about drawing a wall of bugs, so I put up some text reminding me how I should fill it in.

High Contrast Art

To do the bugs -- or more specifically the millipedes (or the things that should look like millipedes) I created a brush that alternated white and black stripes and used it as a ribbon. I don't know if you can put endcaps on the ribbon brush, so all I did was draw the bodies and then painstakingly went back and added the ends of the millipede and then little dots for the legs. The spider webs were done using the felt marker tool. And yeah, those are my initials inscribed into the artwork. :)

Script

1. Jade and Kamiko come upon Natsumi who is standing inside the doorway of the dilapidated Shrine.

2a. From behind, Kamiko grabs her arm and accosts her. They are inside the shrine now. It’s a far shot that focuses on the broken earthenware pot that’s lying on the ground and other broke things strewn all about. Kamiko, Jade, and Natsumi are small in the frame. There are bloody paw prints everywhere.

Kamiko: There you are, kiddo! How are you holding up?

Natsumi: Not that…

Kamiko: (cuts off previous)That’s great noodle arms, so the elixir. Hand it over.

2b. Natsumi looking at the broken earthenware jar. She doesn’t seem to care that Kamiko’s grabbed her arm.

Natsumi: This is where that monster comes from. Right here. This is why Kenji’s dead.

3a. Kamiko glances over at the interior. Jade is standing in the middle of the floor.

Jade: Hey! This must be the storage door for those exorcism materials! Help me open it!

3b. Kamiko has pulled the door open, and, Jade, her, and Natsumi look down the hole. The ladder is broken and it’s a dark pit. There are nasty bugs crawling all around the walls and the ladder is broken.

Kamiko: You want ‘em?

Jade: Err…

And that's all for this week folks. See you next time! Feel free to ask me any questions via the contacts page or in the comments below.