Pictured first, below is the second step in producing an animation cel. In this case, I traced a print of Glen Keane’s rendering. Usually my first step is a pencil drawing on paper then trace my drawing using a rapidigraph pen or ink brush on the acetate as shown above. The $1.00 cotton garden glove with thumb and two fingers removed is the same one I’ve used since my Beatles painting. The glove protects the acetate from my skin and the fingers are cut out to help with drawing and painting control.
In the early days there was usually an assembly line team of artists employed to produce each individual cel for a commercial production animated film. First an animator would sketch broad step character positions on paper. Next cel artists would trace the sketches with ink on acetate. The cel artist would bridge the motion sequences by drawing the character positions between the broad step animator’s sketches. The cels were then painted with acrylic by cel painting artists.
Featured next is the third and final step in producing a cel. This painting was a present for my first granddaughter. She loves this Disney character and calls her “Ariel Mermaid“.
The work actually combines my Princess Ariel cel with my Sebastian and Flounder cel to make a single picture frame from two cels. Since acetate is transparent, multiple production cel artists were able to work on separate characters at the same time then overlap them for one camera film frame.
Typically there are 24 individual camera frames per second of animated film. Disney’s first feature length animated film, Snow White(released 1937), contains hundreds of thousands of drawings done by a team of 750 artists. This traditional by hand labor intensive method of animation has since been outdated by computers.
August 2020 – Ink on acetate
September 2020 – Acrylic paint and ink on acetate
Princess Ariel was created by Glen Keane.
Sebastian and Flounder were created by Ron Clements and John Musker.
Princess Ariel, Sebastian and Flounder are copyrighted by Disney.
As I very often do, I want to make corrections. Ariel Mermaid would have looked better if I had painted her bikini top white. That would have provided contrast for the black ink detail of the shells in her top. But alas, I’ve never actually tried changing an acrylic paint color on acetate… too scary. 😱
