RaeRae Illustrations: Tracing paper techniques

After the success of my misty mountain papercrafted landscape using tracing paper, I've decided to stick with the technique for other sections of my animation for a nice sense of style and continuity. I think it suits my way of drawing and also uses both shadow puppetry and drawing technical methods. There is the section where the faeries are down at the rocky sea shore and for this I couldn't just have a static background. There had to be movement in the waves so this is where the cutouts are brilliant. Rather than drawing the waves in as a separate animated element over a seashore landscape and then also animating hand-drawn characters, the waves can be stop-motioned cut-outs! I like that this is including another methodology too. It's an idea I played around with in my competition entry for the RSA Student Design Awards and was a really nice way to animate.

The waves for my seashore will be much more subtle as the general feel of the animation is more sophisticated and less cartoony than my RSA one, but the process is the same. I had a little play again with my window to see what the effect of watercoloured waves would look like. I quite like it but painting the tracing paper does make it curl. I'm not sure if you can even stretch tracing paper to avoid that problem like with normal watercolour paper. I also think more layers for a subtler effect would be better. The torn edge works nicely though as it's softer than when I used a scalpel. I think the waves need to be behind the beach for a softer effect but that will cause complications in the animating process later on as it's more fiddly and might cause unwanted movements. A peg bar for the foreground so it doesn't move might be the way round that particular problem.