Matte Painting Project - The progress

Matte Painting: scene for the design document
My photo reference for the matte painting:

Changed it a bit in photoshop (got rid of the people, bus, changed the colours, etc):

Painting the foreground (in photoshop):

Finished matte painting:

Design Document: Characters

Illustrations: Mrs. Doasyouwouldbedoneby (Waterfairy character), Mr. Dragonfly (Narrator/Tom's moral guide).

A bit more about my adaptation and tone of the film:  I would like to center this project around themes of fantasy, magic, Victorian England, and the golden rule...

Charles Kingsley's The Water babies ... my adaptation

For class we had to create a Design Document.  I decided to pitch a film adaptation of Charles Kingsley's "The Water Babies,"  a children's novel completed in 1863.  The story is about a young chimney sweep named Tom. Tom lives a rather harsh life in the city under his abusive master Mr. Grimes.  One day they receive a job to clean the chimneys of a large estate in the countryside.  During this job Tom frightens a young girl and is chased outside of the house into the nearby forest.  He stumbles and passes away from falling off a cliff into a stream.  However, he has actually been turned into a "water babie."  As a water babie, Tom goes through various adventures which have to do with good and moral conduct.  In the end he makes a decision to do something that "he does not quite wish to do," earning a return to human form.

So that's the idea in brief.  I will be making changes to the original plot, but my plan is to keep the original theme in tact, which I've interpreted as the Golden Rule.  First thing we have to draw are the main characters.  Here is my finished character drawing of Tom: