Rango - beginning scene

When I rendered out a test for my animation, I placed a plain blue background for the sky. I said I may go back and develop on this, however first I thought I would look at other times where the background has been pretty simple and has worked with the style of the animation.

Take Rango for example, the beginning scenes is of him in his tank, it isn't quite noticeable at first until you see the joints of the background, yet saying this, it still works. There is a slight gradient to the sky and a few clouds added to try and give a sense of realism to it, even though at the time you think it's probably fake anyway. I think it works though because it works with the detailing and texturing of Rango himself, so it doesn't look too out of place.

It's quite interesting to see the contrast between this beginning scene with it being so basic and the rest of the film. The textures for every other character is pretty astounding and so complex. For Rango himself, they had 120 different effects maps and 20 colour maps to make up all of his scales. I would want to try and see what I could do with textures (obviously not to this standard), to see what I would be able to create on Photoshop to then place it back onto my character. However due to the style of my animation it wouldn't fit in very well. As the style of my animation is all based around Brio - block plastic colours, I think just a plain background could work. I could experiment with putting clouds in the background and possibly have them moving across the screen at a slow place just to give it some movement.