How Karmic Knot Gets Its Colors, June 3, 2026

Dear Backers and Friends,

The Magic of Animation is when separate drawings turn into living, moving images. But how do these drawings get their colors? This is an entirely different Magic. We would like to share with you how we do it for Signe Baumane’s new animated feature film Karmic Knot, currently in production. Below is a screenshot of one of the film’s characters being worked on in Krita, a software program used by our Latvian Team at Studio Locomotive to get the job done.

But let’s start at the beginning. In the Brooklyn studio, we take a photograph of a set, like the one below. As you can see, it is not populated with characters because the characters at this stage are only in Signe’s imagination. Only she can see where they sit and what they do. It’s not even in the script.

When Signe starts animating, she conjures the characters out of her head and puts them onto paper, like in this image of the Line Test below. The problem is that Signe animates pencil on paper and her drawings are gray on white. They need color!

Enter Anete Matvejeva, Signe’s collaborator on her previous feature film My Love Affair With Marriage. Anete lives in Riga, which is separated from our Brooklyn studio by 4,210 miles or 7 hours in time difference. But technology (Zoom) allows Anete and Signe to meet twice a week to discuss the colors of each character in each given scene.

After a session, Anete creates charts, guidelines, and instructions for the Latvian Coloring Team. She also guides the Team as they paint shadows on the various characters to accent their dimensionality. This requires understanding the human figure and how light interacts with it.

Here you can see some of Anete’s colorful instructions for Scene 017 where Peteris (voiced by Jay O. Sanders) smacks his young son, an act that sets off a long chain of events.

And here in her sample Anete took off the characters in the foreground so the Team could focus on Ansis (voiced by Patrick Wilson):

Here Anete gives notes to colorists how to do highlights on Ansis’ hair (the zig zag lines in the middle of the hair) and reminds them to soften the edges of shadows to better transition to the lighter parts of his face:

Anete writes her notes both in Latvian AND in English, as some of her Team members  have lived and worked in the UK (including Anete herself) and sometimes English is just more efficient. 

Deeper in the background are her instructions on the left for Daiga (unvoiced, no dialogue) and on the right for Vizma (Dagmara Dominczyk):

And instructions for the foreground characters, Ragne (Gracie Lawrence) in red tones and Zinta (Emma Kenney) in green.

And VOILÀ! the background is now populated with colorful characters. Some of the characters are slightly out of focus because we shoot with a narrow depth of field and focus on where the action of the moment is - here on Ansis. The Latvian Compositing Team does that Magic, but those details will have to wait for another update.

Here is one of the colorists painting on Cintiq, a high-definition monitor that one can draw (or color) directly on.

Our Latvian Team is young and very spirited. Here you can see them having fun on an early spring day in Riga when Riga’s only Sakura tree was in full bloom (right above them). Magic!

Thank you for your love and support!

Love,

Signe, Sturgis and the Karmic Knot Team.

To support the Brooklyn side of Karmic Knot: KarmicKnotMovie.com/support

To watch My Love Affair With Marriage (2022), Signe’ s previous animated feature:

MyLoveAffairWithMarriage.com

To watch Rocks In My Pockets (2014), Signe’s first animated feature: HERE