whoops forgot to upload the final bgs for the beach and hospital!

For the last part of the work experience, I finalised the beach and hospital backgrounds, created some seaweed assets and painted a big underwater background in 4K so that Marie can zoom in and use it as a stage or pan across however she likes. I’m quite proud of how the stickers came out! I hope they’ll be used in the final.

Marie very helpfully gave me two books with gorgeous visuals of seaweed and coral, one on underwater British marine life and one called the seaweed collector’s handbook which was particularly stunning! I’m sometimes a bit lazy to collect references and use them, but I can truly see the difference in how convincing the shapes are after I’ve looked at some proper references. I’m an impatient person and sometimes rush right into drawing rather than taking time to research, but seeing the results of using references convinces me to slow down and save myself time later on. Researching for references is a good habit that I feel I could nurture.

Doing this project has really boosted my confidence as a colourist, so much so I feel like I could potentially get into it in the animation industry. Of course, it wouldn’t be my primary skill since I have never been trained as a painter or sought to develop my colour awareness very far. But it’s nice to know that I can do it when the opportunity or need arises.

That being said, I found it harder to work on the abstract underwater background, because I had less form and shapes to work with as a base and arrange them within the composition. I had to go for a more soft painterly look, which I’m not entirely comfortable with yet since I like clean edges and flat, matte shapes.

Overall, I’ve found that I really like working on a project with others, rather than independently working on my own. I like contributing to someone else’s story ideas and providing the visuals after negotiating and understanding what they need. It may be even preferable to creating alone – even though I’d have complete power over a personal project, I wouldn’t feel the same excitement of collaboration. I suppose this means I’m not cut out to be a showrunner, but that’s okay!

From March 2019 to about May 2021, I did reportage sketching at Hong Kong’s pro-democracy demonstrations. I saw clashes between protestors and riot police get increasingly violent as our government gleefully turned their backs on us to accept orders from the CCP. I did it as part documentation and a reminder to myself of what we were losing. Because everyone in the fight, though they fought nobly from the beginning, always knew it was a losing battle. I did it to remind myself that we stood up for principles of freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of the press, of education decoupled from nationalism, and morality decoupled from government propaganda. We stood up even against forces vastly more powerful.

With the international community also rallying behind us, many western countries opened their borders to Hong Kongers (though for some, it was only right (looking at you, British colonisers)). I genuinely believe that if we didn’t make so much of a fuss and organise ourselves as well as we did, there wouldn’t now be as many opportunities for us to leave.

But we still lost. And I’m here in London and for my own safety, I can’t go back. I was so determined to keep going to protests, keep drawing, spread the word about Hong Kong when I got here, but now I don’t feel like there’s a point. We lost – what more is there to say?

I don’t get to go back home. I just want to be happy.

Tried out some colour keys for the murky underwater scene and sickly hospital room today. I took inspiration from Nathan Fowkes’ way of working. He starts with abstract thumbnails and just lays in a few colours in each composition. I think it leads to cohesion and also greater contrast, and it definitely looks stunning to me.

I think I wouldn’t necessarily do these thumbnails unless I was in the early stage of the process – say, if composition was already finalised, maybe I would just follow the composition and do a few colour options. But painted thumbnails are a great way of freely experimenting with mood and contrast, and the best thing is that you may even surprise yourself with a solution you hadn’t thought of before.

Certainly if I’d just gone straight to drawing the layout and colouring in, I wouldn’t play around with the hints of bright, saturated pinks/oranges/yellows/teals (which I hope are suggestive of sunlight streaming in). If I have time in a future project to play around at this stage, I certainly would.