Have you ever heard of Gertie? She's a dinosaur. A nice little dinosaur who ate a whole tree in one bite, and did all sorts of neat tricks for the man who created her, Winsor McKay. Mr. McKay was a pioneer animator who developed all kinds of techniques for animation which are standard today; including animation cycling and keyframe animation. Unfortunately for the young man he hired to do the backgrounds for Gertie's film, there's one thing he didn't think of... Cel painting. You see, while Mr. McKay did every one of the thousands of frames of animation required for Gertie's 12 minute adventure, it was left to an art student named John A. Fitzsimmons to carefully trace the same rock, lake, and (pre-consumption) tree onto each one of those drawings. The technique of tracing an animated character onto a clear sheet of acetate and then filming it over the same painted background saved countless hours of production time! This technique coined the phrase "cel animation" and would eventually make possible the later animated feats of artists such as Chuck Jones and Walt Disney.
Sadly, though this technique gave so much to animation as a whole, the animation cels themselves have, historically, been considered "production garbage"; thrown away or burned when a studio was finished with them. It is mostly to the credit of very sentimental animators that the few pieces which still do exist survived the end of their production cycle. Now, however, we find ourselves in a new phase of animation history. CG has mostly risen to take the place of cel animation -- even in hand drawn animation. So where does that leave the cel? Is this technique that gave so much to her field to be thrown away just as easily as the cels themselves were? It's my hope that, with her retirement from the field of animation, cel painting might finally find a place that she has been missing for so long. Not as "production garbage" or as a "craft", but as an art form. A medium who's unique look and beauty is respected as a technique as valid as any other. cel painting of Watanuki from xxxHolic Series by Clamp
With that thought in mind... -Welcome to my cel painting tutorial-