When it came to being given a background project, I was stuck for a little while and knowing that I could do any sort of background with a realistic painting style, I decided to go with my theme of fishing village. I sourced for pictures online, of references of mountains, fishing boats, fishing boathouses, wooden bridges and such, to make up my background project.

In the beginning, I wanted to incorporate the technique of Chinese calligraphy painting into my background project. After trying out certain brushes, I still couldn't figure out how I could make it work. Before heading on to the next style, I decided to look up into Impressionism, one of the art movements that I was fairly intrigued by back when I was attending college. The artist that I chose was Eugène Boudin and the reason why I chose Impressionism was that I loved how patchy it looked and the colours were also very subtle and almost pastel-like.

I also decided to do a panning shot instead of a zooming-in shot as I felt like a long pan would allow me to make different parts of the background shot move separately. I found this project to be fairly soothing to do as it just meant painting without having to worry about technicalities in the beginning. Towards completing it, the one and only worry was "How do I pan it?" and instead of using After Effects like most of the people in my course have done, I went forwards with using TVPaint as I had to animate some of the elements.

Here goes:

When I realised that I had to animate a flag waving in the wind, I almost smacked my head a little too hard, but I did it in the end! The flag represents my state– and no matter how far I go, I'll always only have one true home where I'm born & bred and also where my family belongs. I'm so happy with the outcome of this project! It made me realise that I can do (almost) anything that I put my mind to.

Have a nice day!