I received an assignment to illustrate a short fiction piece for Scholastic’s Scope Magazine (for teens 12-14). They also asked me if I could make an animated GIF version of the image. Here’s a long look behind the process.

Initial composition sketches based on the last scene in the story.

next I drew lots of versions of the character in many different poses.

and cut them out

For the animation, I had an idea to create a stop motion turntable. The camera angle would stay with the girl running while the environment (a set I would build) rotated around her with birds flying in the air above her.

composing with simple cut out parts

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I was also asked to create the headline, the title of the story “13 and a half”. I drew the numbers on blue foam insulation and cut them out with a hot wire foam cutter (they’re super fun to use by the way. just keep the windows open). Then painted white so they wouldn’t overwhelm the image while composting.

adding more cut out parts.

The studio is starting to get crowded.

Here is the first composition I shot with my phone…

…and colored in photoshop

Then I made a few more the same way mixing up different cut out parts and referring to my first composition pencil sketches.

I sent them all in and the client loved them…BUT felt that the mood was too jubilant and girly for the tone of the story (no running girl so I had to scrap the turntable idea for the animation).

Round Two

a simpler thirteen

New poses. Hopefully more thoughtful; not so joyful.

And here is round two of sketches.

feedback from the editor was that the figure looked too posed. So we tried some more variations – done just in photoshop.

The approved sketch!

Now onward to final art.

Projecting the image onto bristol board.

I knew I would need to animate the girl so I divided the figure into parts.

and hot glued them to a wire armature.

Now to choose the fabric.

I mark the fabric with some margin around the figure and will then cut it out and hot glue it on the backside.

This red was perfect but it needed to be striped.

So I masked and spray painted some stripes.

I used my cutout of the house in the background as a template for cutting more blue foam insulation.

Same with the hills in the background, which I later sanded into rounder forms.

the main finished parts are in place.

Here’s the ugly backside.

I didn’t take a good photo but the backdrop is a 30″ x 40″ canvas painted in oil with a “Bob Ross” style sky. (i.e. wet on wet)

The studio is getting very crowded now.

The parts were looking good to me but it felt a little sparse and I didn’t like the seams between the hill shapes and the ground.

So I made some more grass by running three colors of green paper through my shredder.

Here is the final photo.

Now to do the other parts in the computer.

I sculpted a bird in Zbrush with three different wing positions to animate them flapping.

And did several variations on painting them so they wouldn’t all look like the same bird (though a key part of the story is that all of the birds look basically the same).

Then I rendered the variations of the birds in Zbrush and exported them to Photoshop for the final composition.

Here is the final image as it ran in the magazine.

The animation took another day of stop motion shooting the girl and then animating the rendering of the birds (there are eighteen total) on the Photoshop timeline. I know, it should really be done in Aftereffects or something but I’m too cheap to subscribe to the entire Adobe suite so I’m squeezing all I can out of Photoshop.

And here is the animation which went on the website.