(art posted on 11/19/2022)

While I have animated stuff in the past, Sunken Laundromat was my first attempt at a fully animated scene. It ended up taking a little over 40 hours total, done over the span of 17 days, which was a lot longer than I expected. Making these looping animated backgrounds really tests your patience, and I struggled a lot with getting this one completed.

Before we get into the analysis, I’d also like to mention that my art critique skills are pretty sub-par, since I haven’t really analyzed art in the past. They’ll get better as I post more of these, but for now you’ll have to excuse my lack of knowledge.

Structure and Composition

To sell the underwater look, I drew every single line to slightly wave and distort, simulating the refraction of light. This means that each line had to be given 4 frames. While it does create the look that I was going for, there are a few major drawbacks to this approach.

The first and most obvious issue is that it takes a very long time to make. Just the lines alone took over 8 hours to draw, so it’s hard to call it an efficient use of time. Another major disadvantage to this way of portraying water is that it scales poorly. Towards the later stages of drawing, I found myself unable to add the details that I wanted to add due to the difficult process of drawing everything 4 times in a wavy motion. This is the reason why the products in the vending machine are completely blank or why the stuff in the washing machines at the back do not have the distortion effect at all.

Despite the flaws, I’m still unsure how I could’ve approached the distortion differently. It’s possible to create the underwater effect in after effects without having to redraw anything, but the feel of it would be completely different. Something that I was going for was a hand-drawn look where there’s a ton of imperfections and inconsistencies, which would be completely lost if I were to replace it with VFX.

The one thing that I would’ve changed if I could redo it were to put more effort into being organized, since keeping track of all of the wavy lines across multiple layers made the lines take at least 30% longer to draw than they should’ve.

Looking back, the proper organization is actually very simple as well. To start, I could categorize everything into either fish, foreground, floor, background, and behind-background (inside the washing machines). From there, working on each category in their own separate project would’ve made the process far smoother since I wouldn’t have to worry about unrelated layer clutter. If I had done this, I may even have been able to add some of the finer details that I mentioned earlier.

As for how the scene is composed, the layout is super simple with just a bunch of washing machines lined up in 1 point perspective. The reason I chose something so simple is because I originally planned to include a wider variety of aquatic life, especially plants, but I wasn’t able to get it to look right due to lack of knowledge and understanding of them. I would absolutely benefit from going to an aquarium.

I still think the fish are enough to make the scene feel populated, but it could’ve felt much more alive if the fish had objects to swim around and things to interact with.

Colors

In my opinion, my choice of colors are the biggest weakness for the scene as a whole. To start, pretty much everything is blue. This was originally supposed to be balanced out by having aquatic plant life, but I didn’t change anything after discarding that idea, leaving the scene kinda bland in color. A funny side effect of everything being blue is that the vending machine sticks out, being the only non-blue thing in the scene. One of my artist friends actually asked me if there was any significance to the vending machine since they thought I was trying to call attention to it.

Another element to color that was lacking is my variety of values. Let’s look at an image of it in grayscale:

Something that you’ll notice is that everything falls into a small section of midtone values. This makes the entire scene feel flat since there isn’t anything that’s very light or dark. I should also mention that I didn’t draw any shading/lighting, which are things that would both create opportunities to use a wider range of values and give the scene more depth.

It certainly wouldn’t be easy, but I imagine a more skilled artist would’ve had lighting that gets partially obstructed as fish pass by, which would make the space feel much more 3-dimensional.

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Anyways, that’s it for this entry of self-critique. Again, I’m still a bit of a noob and absolutely suck at criticizing art, so if you have anything in mind that I haven’t mentioned, it’d be huge if you left a comment and let me know your thoughts. With that said, thanks for reading!