Bandits in the Woods: Workflow (Patreon)

The black and white image comes from the thumbnail storyboards.  I use these to make the character sheets where I clean up the poses which will eventually get used to make the animation rigs, and I clean up the backgrounds as well.  In this specific instance I haven't cleaned up the poses in this thumbnail, but I had other ones finished and used them.  At this point in the process I'm trying to finish backgrounds and fine tune the artistic direction.

The second color image is where I roughed out the color background and get an idea of how I want the space to look.  It also helps me figure out how to balance the attributes of the backgrounds with the characters.   Those two parts of the creative process have a sense of tug and pull and they mold one another until they fit just right.

The main clean image is very close to finished.  It has all the right shapes and colors in their place.  The only thing I would add are painted textures to the shapes.  I'm going to find a way to streamline that painting process, because the Mario house BG used that and it took about 3 days to finish.  I would like to be able to get 2-3 of these backgrounds done in a day.