More to animation than characters - Sets?

[wizaerd]

I have an idea for a short little animation, and I have my characters in a 3/4 view. Now comes the really hard part, the set. First of all, I'm am not particularly graphically capable, so I'm not all that great with perspectives, etc...

I'd like some tips on creating sets and props. For example, in my scene, the two characters are in a living room, sitting on chairs and/or a couch, and both are reading. One will be getting up off the furniture and walking out of the room.

So what is the best approach for drawing said chairs and/or couch, from a perspective that when sitting on them, they look good?

[sorvade]

The way I would have done it would be to make a rough stickman/shape sketch of how you want the scene to look like, with some handy inspirational videos/pics to give you a guideline.

Then collect references of the props or set in the correct camera angle, edit out the saturation in an external image editor, import into anime studio as an image and create the props over it with a bright stroke color(you can turn off fills for better visibility).

[slowtiger]

I use a lot of photographs for reference. Unfortunately rooms and interieurs rarely are photographed from a point of view suitable for animation. In that case screenshots from actual films or TV shows help a lot. Try a google image search with some sitcom titles, you'll get the right angles soon.