What does Sleeping Beauty have in common with Ranger Smith? Besides trees.
I love to take an idea and think up variations of it.
Not only the different ways to do limited walks, by varying which part of the body is held, which pans up and down, which parts move etc.
I also figured out a general way to make colors seem richer -well I got it from studying Disney cartoons and painters I like. If you want something to be a general color but not seem flat - say blue....break up the design elements into enclosed parts....
The shirt has a collar and cuffs, he has a hat and pants. If they were all painted the same shade of blue, he would look monochromatic and very flat.
By taking each part and varying the:Value: How light or dark it is
Tint/Hue: how pure or mixed the blues are- mid blue, next to violet-blue-next to greenish blue, etc.
Saturation: How much or how little gray is mixed in with the shade of blue
All these slight shifts from the main color emulate light and shadow and reflective light in real life. These variations from the main color make the overall image - while still actually flat - appear to have more depth....just by the use of colors. In Sleeping Beauty, each character has an overall color scheme. Aurora has neutral colors. There is a blue bird, a brown squirrel, a red bird etc, a purplish villain etc...within each of the main color idea there are parts that are all variations from the middle color in different non-mathematical proportions. Each character reads well against each other because of the central color, but each character isn't overly flat by being too mathematically flat and pure.
You can take this idea of varying a general idea and apply it to every aspect of creativity, not just color or funny walks. And it's really fun to do it. It makes the idea get more and more creative and rich, the more you experiment with it. It's controlled evolution.
The basic idea of the scene was: Ranger Smith starts the day recognizable as the standard homogenized Ranger of 1960. Then as he walks behind each tree he emerges as a variation. The variations get more extreme with each tree, until finally he ends up back to normal as the 1960 model sheet Ranger. Even when I used the standardized Ranger I couldn't bring myself to paint his uniform all one color like the original.
I just like rich and subtle color too much. That's why it burns the crap out of me when they "remaster" classic Disney and other cartoons. They pump up the middle colors and take out all the subtle variations in hues and saturations. This makes the old cartoons look like modern Saturday Morning cartoons. Flat and monochromatic.
Ever try to animate a finger snap? It's a bugger.
http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/01Principles/walks/ranger/walk6walk7.mov
BLUE
moving the slider up and down you will see the color change hue. If you keep your design bits within a range of the main color, it makes the overall color seem richer.
BLUE TOWARDS VIOLET
BLUEGREEN LESS SATURATED
I'm not suggesting you use Photoshop to color your cartoons. I just like their color sampler, because you can see these concepts very clearly this way.
Moving the circle to the left or right changes the saturation of the color. Combining variations of saturation, with variations of hue makes your colors all the richer and deeper.
