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\tSomething you don’t see very often anymore, traditional cel animation. I first worked out the animation on paper, drawing over a light sketch of the background. Thankfully, I already had an acme animation hole punch for this. For the ink phase, I laid a transparent acetate sheet over the pencil animation and copied the lines as best as possible with a micron liner and a red sharpie. With each frame, I started with the most difficult lines first, and if I didn’t nail them, I had to start over. Gloves were needed for handling the sheets. If they became covered in finger prints, the ink would not adhere. Once that was done, I flipped the sheets over and painted them using acrylic paint. To achieve proper opacity, it required globbing the paint on quite thickly. I also had to write down the ratios of the mixture of paints to ensure color consistency on each frame, just in case I didn’t mix enough paint for the whole project.
\tThen I painted the background using gouache. That part is easiest to explain, but it took me the longest to execute. I am in no way a traditional painter. I just had to keep doing it over and over until it was acceptable.
\tAnd then, all you gotta do is lay your finished cels over the background, lay a plane of glass over that, light it, and take pictures. I lit the scene as best as I could, but this is where I ran into problems that I could not overcome. I tried using an antiglare sheet of glass meant for tablets. That actually looked good, but the material is required to be heavy, so it was not suitable. Even using a combination of antiglare sheet and glass, and no matter how I moved my lights around, I could not manage to remove all reflections.
\tI tried using a scanner, but there was just no way to insert it into the bed while attached to the pegbar, just because of the shape of the thing. A dead end? No. I put to use a piece of long unheeded advice, crying out to be applied:
\t“If you think you are at a dead end at something you are trying to do, just stand back, and if it is meant to be, an answer or break will appear. Just remember, there are many sides to a mountain and many ways to climb it. If you get stopped, back up, regroup, and try another way. If you are still not successful, maybe it is not meant to be. Accept it as experience and go after something else for a while. If it is meant to be, having it on the backburner simmering for a while is not bad. It will pop up again, and the path to attain it will be there. Everything in its time.”
\tI recently bought an 11x17 scanner so I could scan in larger artwork. This is a real nice piece of equipment, and it just so happened that the plane of the scanning bed extends right to the edge. It was just the right shape to let the pegbar hang out.
\tI did this to see if I could. And my awesome commissioner \r\n\t\t\t\t\t
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Pic 2: Insurmountable Glare
Pic 3: BG
Pic 4: Pencil Test
Pic 5: Inks
Pic 6: All