An Incredible night in - The Pixar Times

On the weekend I was lucky enough to be featured in The Pixar Times' "PixART" section of the blog. This is basically a platform for Pixar fans to put their spin on their favourite characters from the studio's ever growing output of top notch films.

As you can see I chose The Incredibles as my inspiration.

I also thought I would share with you a few stepping stone stages I took to create this. I illustrated this in Flash with a few Corel Painter textures thrown in and some basic colour tweaking in Photoshop.

My idea was pretty much there from the beginning. Have all the central characters together on the coach watching a movie. I sketched this very roughly with the flash brush tool, to get some idea of character placement.

Then I use Flash's "onion skin" tool as a digital lightbox and give the characters some more detail. I also play around with the positions a bit more, moving Dash off the floor and adding the gag with him zipping and stealing the popocorn.

Then I do another pass with the brush tool, refining the details more and play around more with the expressions. I also fix up the room's perspective a little more.

Then I go for the final colour pass, again drawn in Flash but this time with the pen tool and eliminating the lines after the colour fills. I like the warmth in the room but I wanted to create the blueish glow you get when you watch TV in a darkened room so.......

I export all the Flash layers out as .png files and recreate the image in Photoshop. Here I tweak hues, saturation and brightness levels until I get (what I think) replicates the TV light.

I hope you like the final piece, its one I'm quite proud of :) Click here to read a full interview with me about the piece and general stuff