I wanted to bring the world of my recent drawings to life, so I decided to make a single scene with some animated elements in it, looping endlessly. The goal was to convey a sense of time standing still, or being 'stuck in eternity'.

First I made a couple of thumbnails and notan sketches of the image I had in my head, to get a feeling of the atmosphere. I then transfered to drawing on A3 sized paper.

I figured it's common practice to have scenes which are looped forever in game development, until the player interacts with it. So I looked at how they made the scenes in Amanita Design's video game 'Creaks'. Radim Jurda of Amanita Design explained how they made the backgrounds by drawing big on paper and applying watercolor there, while finishing up in the computer. I wanted to practice a similar approach, but while they used cut-out animation, I stuck to frame-by-frame drawing instead.

You can see the gradual evolution of the scene in the gallery below:

The animation was all done digitally in Krita. I used some soft pencils to approach the analogue drawing as closely as possible. Most moving objects are loops consisting of either 36, 72, or 144 frames. I shifted their tempo's a bit to make it more of an organic flow.

All sounds were gratefully taken from freesound.org.