New: We Bare Bears Backgrounds

Cartoon Network's newest animated show, We Bare Bears, premiered July 27th. I was fortunate to freelance background design on several of the first episodes. The show takes place in San Francisco so it's a great fit for my love of drawing cityscapes.

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I was trying to get a job on the crew but was their third choice out of two available positions. Oh well. But that made me their top freelance background designer and the work was steady for a few months.

These were designed in autumn of 2014 when We Bare Bears was early in their production. It took 10 months from when I drew some of these until they aired on TV.

Development Art for Virtual Reality Animation

Since these concept drawings were scrapped from the project, I'm going to show them off. They were part of animation storyboard for virtual reality. Y'know, the technology where you wear screens over your eyes and you feel like you're someplace else.

These location drawings are distorted with multiple perspectives to emulate the experience of looking around inside the virtual reality world. It was fun to work with the challenge of a technology I hadn't worked on before. The storyboard itself focused on the character action and not the framing of the scene, since what the viewer sees is up to them. That's why these backgrounds have no sense of cinematic composition.

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Goos Island Sewery

This drawing was for an animation background test.

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What is Animation Background Layout?

In traditional animation, a background layout is the line drawing of the background for a scene. It is not the finished background painted in color that you see on the screen.

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Layouts are drawn from storyboards which define the action and perspective in the scene. Because storyboard artists draw backgrounds in a rough, simplified style, background layout artists take them to the next level by defining the detail and perspective. Layout drawings are then given to the background painters to color and complete the visual style.

Depending upon the style of the film or show, the lines of the layout drawings may be visible in the finished background that is used in a final production. Or the visual style may be void of line work, thus the layouts serve as a guide for the painters.

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The line work will be part of the finished background.

Depending upon the production, background layout artists also do background design. This is standard in television animation, which is my field, and the position is often titled background designer. The designer must envision new locations when they are called for in a script, taking into account the action of the characters and the mood of the scene. The design drawings are given to the storyboard artists to show them what a place looks like.

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A design drawing to establish a new location. The rain is animated and would not be part of the final background layout, but is drawn here for mood.

I often get asked what I do in animation since people outside of the industry are unfamiliar with the process. It's a lot more fun than this dry explanation of the job. A lot of creativity goes into making places that are believable in the world of the characters.

Most importantly, backgrounds must support the narrative of the story. Designers take into account things like the personal style of characters or the economic state of imaginary neighborhoods. They draw places that have history, like showing what has happened previously in a location, even if we never saw it happen, or the history of a place long before the characters existed. Even when imaginations dream up incredible fantasy worlds, places often have facets that make them relatable to our everyday world.

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Left: My layout drawing. Right: The finished painted background with characters and effects.

More than just drawing places background layout is work layered with complexities. That's what makes it so fun!

2015 Update: As my career shifts, I've been doing more storyboarding than background design.

Hey Arnold Background Designs

Every new location in Hey Arnold! had to be designed before the final background layouts were drawn with clean pencil lines. These designs were based on the story in the script, how characters were to interact in the location, and the mood of the scenes. When designing new places, I typically drew in a faster, rougher style than the finished background layouts.

Newly added backgrounds to the Hey Arnold! gallery:

See more Hey Arnold! Backgrounds.