Making Backgrounds

I wanted to try to create a background for my animation piece. I decided to use an image of a suburb in Florida, since this is the place where Trayvon lived.

I uploaded the image in to Illustrator to trace over the basic outlines of the houses and the street. I find it useful to use Illustrator for tracing as you can go back and edit out any jagged lines. This helps to create a more smooth, conventional cartoon effect.

I then used the image in Photoshop to colour it in. I used the magic wand tool and fill to place the colours. 

To give some depth to my image, I added a few layers. I used the noise filter to make the ground look more grainy. I added a gradient layer to the sky so that it didn't look so flat and used the paintbrush tool to create the appearance of clouds.

Here is what the textures layers look like without the background. You can see the different places where I added shading and detail.

Here is the final result. I think that this looks for more dynamic than the original version. I should incorporate some more details and textures in my backgrounds so that they look more engaging.