Josh Floyd

10 Oct 2023

#PortfolioDay Another year another portfolio day. I'm Josh and I'm an illustrator and designer that loves painting 'mons and backgrounds!

Josh Floyd reposted

RyanStorm

@ryanstorm.bsky.social

Today is the final day for the Kickstarter for Mother is a Stinkbug! Last chance to grab rewards, to see the film early, or get a bundle discount on Merch/Swag!! It also increases both the animation budget and the amount we can allocate for donation! tinyurl.com/MotherisaSti...

The new Ratbasterdz episode is now on Newgrounds! Gonna post some of the backgrounds I painted down below in a thread! These are mostly of the fantasy sequence. I’ll post about the basement shots later.

View full thread

Much love to Lukas and Rod! Between the otherworldly designs and architecture of Rod’s work and the energy and character of Lukas’ drawings, their amazing layouts really elevated the ep. I did my best to make sure their personal touches still came through in the final version.

newgrounds.comRATBASTERDZ: WADE'S SONGAN ODYSSEY OF WADE

Big thanks to them, Jon, and the rest of the team. If you want to check out the new episode, you can click the link and head over to @newgrounds www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/...

This BG is one of my favorites. Mostly from how little I had to actually paint, to bring Lukas’ drawings to life. I feel like I finally figured out how to suggest a lot atmosphere without overcomplicating things or getting bogged down in the small stuff.

And lastly we have the “gross-up” shots of Jay and his tattoos. Jon gave me the tattoo designs and told me to go crazy with it. It was a nice change of pace going from painting dungeons and villages to painting open sores and stretchmarks.

These turned out a lot darker than I expected. All of charred bits of the buildings throughout the village and the black smoke filling the sky meant the majority of the light in these came from the glow of the fires.

Fun fact: I’m pretty sure I reused the same sky gradient in like 90% of these lol. Moving the textures around a bit and all the smoke helped keep things from looking too “copy-pasted.”

I did my best not to lose Rod‘s surreal details from the initial sketches. But man, there were so many bricks on the walls and floors of this place lol. A lot of the lighting and textures here working overtime to hide all of my continuity issues from BG to BG.

The final area was the medieval village. Lots reds and oranges since the place was being burned to the ground.

The cold mountain tops were pretty straightforward, mostly rocky textures and some overcast clouds to really set the mood. Typical dark fantasy with snowy, windswept mountains. We transition from the cold blues into the otherworldly green pretty quickly.

The dungeon was much more involved. I think we had a little over 20 backgrounds in the dungeon area. There was a lot more to consider since these had the fighting sequences and more dynamic camera effects.

For the fantasy sequence, Jon gave me reference pics from Heavy Metal mags, 70’s fantasy and old metal albums. He really wanted to push the moody colors and dark atmosphere. There were 3 main areas, the cold, blue mountains, the dank, green dungeon and the burning, red village.

newgrounds.comBest of August 2026!Your votes are in and the Best of August have been decided!Top Ten Movies ($500, $300, $250, $200, $100 for 5th-10th, $200 for Best Original)The top movie based on original material and winner of $700...

17 Sept

Can’t believe I did backgrounds for 3 of these!! Congrats everybody!!

Newgrounds@newgrounds.com

Our Best of August have been announced! www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/15...

Josh Floyd reposted

RyanStorm

@ryanstorm.bsky.social

12 Sept

The Kickstarter for "Penguin Midnight" 's Prequel: "Mother is a Stinkbug" is now LIVE!! CHECK IT OUT AND CONSIDER SUPPORTING THIS ENDEAVOR tinyurl.com/MotherisaSti...

tinyurl.com"Mother is a Stinkbug" - "Penguin Midnight" Prequel - Anime"Whisper of The Heart" vibes short film following a warm hearted girl pushed into extreme circumstances, inspired by real interviews.

Josh Floyd reposted

RyanStorm

@ryanstorm.bsky.social

29 Aug

HAPPY FRIDAY!! Penguin Midnight, my 26 minute short film, is now live on Youtube!! Please give it a watch! youtu.be/PeaJMUc_d_E

Ryan’s new short film is finally live on Newgrounds! I spent around a year painting the backgrounds for it. I think it was like almost 130 backgrounds in total 🤯 Here’s a thread of some of my favorites and some of my thoughts!

It was a lot of trial and error trying to get things to a “good enough” state. I learned a lot and after this scene in particular, I really want to keep pushing things even more in Blender. The dream is to someday figure out how to replicate the painted 2D style inside Blender!

newgrounds.comPenguin MidnightIts been awhile. Do you still remember me? Do you remember Tokyo?

This was a huge project and I’m glad @RyanStormah asked me to be on it. Thanks for reading through another massive thread of background ramblings. If you haven’t seen the short film yet, you can check it out on NewGrounds here: www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/...

So using my trusty Google Street View, I went down the street slowly building up the town. We spent a while tweaking and adjusting camera placement for all the shots, but finally had the roughs locked down. I went back through with another pass at details and some basic colors.

It was a back and forth with how much detail to add in Blender vs just paint in during the paint over stage. I tried to intentionally warp and break some models so they wouldn’t look so “3D” and precise.

And finally, the Akihabara street. Man what a doozy. Originally I sketched out some shots but after having to adjust them and redraw them multiple times, I moved to Blender.

I knew it was going to take forever to build a whole street with storefronts and random props all along, but we were looking at over 25 BGs in this scene and the idea of drawing the same buildings that many times by hand would have been torture.

Same set up: basic single room with lots of different shots all around the place.Once approved, I went back and added the details and some basic color. This cafe was based on a real place in Tokyo, so I had a number of reference images to go off of.

That also provided me a basis for colors, although we did push them a bit to be more “love themed.” The original cafe had a lot more detail and stuff just everywhere so I simplified a lot of things to keep the shots from looking too busy/distracting. (Also helped speed things up)

For these, I took Ryan’s storyboard sketches, matched them as best I could in Blender and rendered the shot. We went back and forth making sure the 3D shots looked right and thankfully adjusting the camera angle and focal length was super quick!

After the success of the Love Hotel room, I was excited to do the same with the Maid Cafe.

I was tempted to use Blender since there’s so much detail and structures, but decided against it. Since there were only few backgrounds for the scene, I didn’t think it was worth trying to model and paint over a whole city street.

Speaking of Blender… The first scene I mocked up in 3D was the Love Hotel room. It was a relatively bare environment with simple props and detail, so it made sense to use 3D. Plus we had 24 unique BGs set in here including some moving camera shots.

The rest of the office was pretty straightforward. Mostly just some grungy details and anime paraphernalia scattered around the room. It was loosely based on our old basement apartment (except this place had a heater). Comment down below if you can count all the references!

Ok next up is the Akihabara Station, more signs and light bloom! I used a handful of Google Street View images to mock up the layout of the station’s interior and exterior.

The BookOff scene originally had a lot more signs on the shelves. I wanted to keep it as close to Ryan’s reference photos as possible. But this was nearing the back half of the project and after drawing all those books, I made an executive decision to not care about em anymore.

Speaking of cutting corners! We got creative with the cityscape shot outside the Sapporo Office. I cut up a bunch of pics of the city to stitch together a grayscale version that we could zoom out of. I really liked the effect and I wish we could have used it more in the film.

Here’s some process shots of one of them. Originally this one looked much different. Ryan found a stairway while exploring the city that looked way more cinematic.

Man, I drew so many signs… Speaking of which, the snowy nighttime shots in Hakodate had their fair share of them as well. Sorry if all the signs don’t translate properly. I was using Google Translate and Streetview for most of em, so please go easy on this baka gaijin. 🙇‍♂️

The Shibuya Station and Red Light District were fun change. Ryan wanted a much moodier and extreme palette for these so we go from harsh reds to purples in the Red Light District to greens and harsh bokeh in the station.

A lot of these were also based on pics Ryan took himself while in Japan. (Except the Hachiko statue, lol that one’s actually in New England)

The big panning BG was a lot of fun! There was a lot of layering for this one to create a cool parallax effect out the train window.

Next up is the Tokyo Underground Mall. Google Street View was incredibly helpful for understanding that place's layout. For the colors, we went with a warm golden hue. I used A LOT of light bloom to avoid having to draw extra details in the stores 🤫

I believe after those, we moved on to the JR train interiors. These have a colder and more stark color palette than the warm and cozy bar. These also had a lot of compositing going on with moving elements, characters and background assets.

Moving on to the other train scene, this one had a softer and warmer tone. In general, Ryan really wanted the backgrounds to have this kinda hazy, dreamlike quality to them. So I pushed the airbrushing hard to blend and wash out the colors

We started with the bar in the Red Light District. We wanted a warm environment to contrast with the cold winter night outside. The pictures on the wall are actually all photos of Ryan and I from back when we were roommates, just super posterized and compressed.