Two-Color Cartoons

Still from "Hell's Fire," 1934

 For a period of time in the 1930s, some studios made cartoons with a two-color process.

At first, Walt Disney exclusively controlled the full Technicolor method in animation, so other companies were forced to devise a system called Cinecolor or ComiColor that used a more limited palette.



The subtractive system used two sets of film stock, one filtering the image to yield the red hues, and the other blue or green.

These were later recombined, resulting in a complementary gamut that looked complete, even though it lacked strong yellows, greens, or purples.


Compared to black and white, these early color cartoons feel like full color. Complementary gamuts are appealing because a color scheme is powerful not so much for which colors you put into it, but for which ones you leave out of it.

The color quality can be simulated when you're doing a painting by restricting the mixtures on your palette or by using a limited number of tubes of paint, such as Prussian blue plus flame red.
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Find out more
Here are some cartoons by Ub Iwerks that use this process:
Happy Days
Brementown Musicians
Balloon Land
Tom Thumb
Hell's Fire

More about color gamuts in my book Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter

Websites about the 2-color cartoons: Color Cinema History  and Wikipedia on Cinecolor

My other channels:
JamesGurneyArt on Instagram
GurneyJourney YouTube Channel
My public Facebook page
James Gurney on Twitter
GurneyJourney on Pinterest

Making the Animated Short 'KaBoom!'

Stop-motion animator PES shares how he created his short 'KaBoom!' (Link to video)

He explains how he associates one object with another, both visually and conceptually. Everyday objects and toys found around the house stand in for the elements of a sequence of aerial bombardment.


As with all PES productions, the final film relies on a rich soundtrack to extend the impact of the visual. (link to video)
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PES's website includes his 'haul videos,' where he scours the Long Beach Flea Market for used stuff and makes a taco out of a baseball glove.

In the children's picture book world, these visual puns have been perfected by Walter Wick in his Can You See What I See? and I Spy Fantasy series.

Disney's 'Tricks of the Trade'

(Link to YouTube Video) The decade of the 1930s was a pioneering era in animation. Artists at Disney Studios developed the new art form all the way from Steamboat Willie to Pinocchio.

The animators had to figure out the principles of character animation for themselves. As Disney says: "We took you into a unique schoolhouse where the pupils were their own teachers. They had to be because no one in the world could give them the answer to what they wanted to know."
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Books
The Art of Animation: The Story of the Disney Studio Contribution to a New Art This is one of the early books the Disney Studios published on animation.
The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation This book by two of the "Nine Old Men" is one of the standard reference books on the history and art of Disney animation.

Animation Tests

(Link to video)  Here are a few animation tests — Sprocket runs,  eats paper,  and Clement grabs some power ups.

Here's a still frame showing the motion blur and live-action dynamics captured in-camera.

Replacement Animation

Replacement animation is a form of stop motion. But instead of making one puppet that you put through its paces, you make interchangeable pre-sculpted elements and swap them in and out.



For example if you watch closely, you can see that the little impact cloud-puffs are a animated with 5 separate rings of sculpted white blobs on very thin wires.

It takes a while to create all the stop-motion puppets and accessories for replacement animation. But once you do it, the animation goes fast. It's easy to animate 10 seconds per hour, while with traditional animation, it would take up to two full weeks to animate that many seconds.

(Link to video on YouTube)

Think Outside the Box

Whenever I hear a self-help cliché, like "Get our ducks in a row," I can't help thinking of the metaphor literally.



When someone says we should "think outside the box," I imagine what Mrs. Basher would do. (Link to video)

If you watch closely, you may glimpse a few frames like this, where the motion blur gives a different spice to the action.

Mrs. Basher versus Social Media

Mrs. Basher is fed up with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest, so she's going to let them all have it. (Link to video)



In the new end credit sequence, the three main characters in the Clementoons universe are Clement, Mrs. Basher, and mini-monster Sprocket. 

Each of them is represented by a set of a dozen or so different sculpts, and each sculpt has a specific range of movements.  

The style of action is inspired by video games. You might notice flashes of light with the zap rays (using mirrors), and little cloud puffs (using sculpted white blobs on wires) when Clement lands.

To get those little power-up gemstones moving, I turn beads on wires a fraction of a turn with each new exposure.

I puppeteer some of the poses with the camera set for a slow shutter speed to get motion blur in each frame of the fast action sequences. This gives the stop motion a different look and opens up a range of possibilities.

This kind of animation is fast to execute. You can animate about 10 seconds per hour, while in normal hand drawn or stop motion animation that much footage would take a week or two.

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Meet Mrs. Basher

Here's a little teaser intro for Mrs. Basher, a new stop-motion superhero. (Link to YouTube video)

Technical notes: The lighting setup is a yellow gel in front of a soft box, with a cardboard snoot on the key light. Smoke is from a party fogger, and the camera (@60fps slowed by half) moves on a homemade radius dolly. Music by Kevin MacLeod.

Using Cel Vinyl Paint

Nasan Hardcastle asks: "Have you ever experimented with cel-vinyl paint before? Do you know much about the process of using it in a more painterly application?"

Establishing shot for Fire and Ice by James Gurney

Yes, when I worked as a background artist on the animated movie Fire and Ice, we used cel vinyl paint. This is the same paint used for the flat colors used on the back of the animation cels.

I painted about 600 paintings for the film at a rate of about 11 a week. Not all were highly finished or detailed, though.



This spooky forest background consists of two layers. The segmented trees and mushrooms are painted on a foreground layer of acetate. That way those foreground elements can overlap the animation layers.

Cel vinyl is very opaque, with strong adhesion and and a tough emulsion. It's formulated to work well on acetate. Regular acrylic will generally bead up on acetate.

Cel vinyl is still made by the Cartoon Colour company. It comes in liquid form in bottles. The colors are premixed and consistent. We squeezed them out onto a butcher tray and painted mostly with sable and synthetic round and flat brushes.

I used cel vinyl here in a very painterly way. I started with big brushes and used the airbrush to help separate the foreground from the background. In this case the layers are all part of the same painting on illustration board. The figures (lower right) are registered on top of the painting.

Cel vinyl tended to clog the airbrushes, and it destroyed the Winsor and Newton Series 7 brushes that we used.



Most of the backgrounds are remarkably small, about 9x12 inches. This establishing shot of Nekron's glacier was a little bigger, about 11x14 inches.

This gargoyle  spews out animated lava. Each sequence needed a different color mood: in this case red light from below and blue light from above.

James Gurney, Establishing shot of Fire Keep, about 16 x 20, cel vinyl.

Although we had a wide range of colors available, we restricted the palette for each sequence, and that probably got me started thinking about gamut mapping and color scripting.

James Gurney and Thomas Kinkade at Ralph Bakshi’s animation studio in 1981.

Here I am working on that volcano painting. The other background painter was Tom Kinkade (misspelled Kincade in the credits). Later in his career he returned to cel vinyl paint for his cottage scenes, though I haven't gone back to it.

Of all the paints I use now, I'd say Holbein's Acryla Gouache is most similar to cel-vinyl, in that it's an opaque, water-based medium with a closed, matte surface when it dries.

The Art of Behind-the-Scenes

In addition to perfecting the art of animation, Disney Studios mastered the art of the behind-the-scenes film. (Link to YouTube)



In this glimpse into the making of the 1955 feature Lady and the Tramp, animator Frank Thomas demonstrates lip synch and the pencil test. After that, Milt Kahl runs through some character sketches for Tramp, and flips through the scene introducing Tramp.

The live action camera moves in and out of their workspaces and smoothly cuts to the filmed tests, some of which have been cleaned up and given a hint of background and flicker especially for this presentation.

Even though the view of the process is slightly contrived, it gives a good layman's introduction to how animated films were made.

Walt Disney recognized the power of television as a vehicle for sharing the process and the history of his art form. His television program, which began in 1954 on ABC, presented "The Story of the Animated Drawing.

Disney wasn't the first to create behind-the-scenes documentaries, though. Winsor McCay did it decades earlier (Link to YouTube), with whimsical exaggeration.



Behind-the-scenes features have become a staple of movie marketing and fan-building today, given the powerful window that YouTube now affords. Even hotly anticipated movies with a lot of carefully guarded surprises, such as Blade Runner 2049, give a few peeks behind the curtain before the movie is released.

Did Medieval people walk the way we do?

Here's a video that's impossible to watch without walking around and trying it out. (Link to video)
Roland Warzecha proposes that Medieval people walked with different body mechanics, planting the toe first, rather than the heel first—or at least, softening the heel strike.

I've been trying it out, but it's hard to build up any speed and it seems like a lot of effort to maintain that mode. Maybe my tendons are too short. Anyway, I'd be interested in what you think after you try it out, especially what animators think about this.
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Further reading
The modern medical establishment regards "toe-walking" as an abnormality
New York magazine article on barefoot walking
Monty Python's Ministry of Silly Walks

New Book: The Color of Pixar

A new visual book called The Color of Pixar by long-time Pixar artist Tia Kratter presents color schemes used in the Pixar movies.

The book presents hundreds of stills taken from all the Pixar films so far, including Cars 3 and the upcoming Coco. The stills are chosen for their predominant hue, and arranged by color. 

As you flip through the book, you proceed through the rainbow, making it easy to compare related color schemes that appear on adjacent pages.

Each image is presented singly, surrounded by a full-bleed colored border. The captions tell you the movie that the still came from, but there's no text explaining why the sequence was rendered in that color scheme. 

It's really a purely visual book that will appeal to artists looking for inspiration on color choices. It might also appeal to teachers who want to explore the subject of color with students.

Kratter says: "Color doesn't just make things beautiful—it makes things emotional."

The book invites speculation about how Pixar uses warm, glowing colors to evoke happiness, and dull, cool blues to suggest sadness, or green-grays to convey fear or alienation.

Sample page from The Art of Pixar: The Complete Color Scripts

If you're more interested in how color is used to enhance the particular story arc of each film, another fascinating book is The Art of Pixar: The Complete Color Scripts, which presents each of the films in terms of the color thumbnail plan called the color script.

Throughout Pixar's history, these color scripts evolved from little pastel studies to a digital plan that expresses not only the color schemes, but also the shape language of each sequence.
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Books
The Color of Pixar by Tia Kratter, currently $20.36 on Amazon.
The Art of Pixar: The Complete Color Scripts, currently $28.49 on Amazon.

Previously on GurneyJourney
Pixar supercut arranged by color (video)
Resource for movie screenshots (website)

Tinkerbell Reference

Disney Studios went to great lengths to shoot photo reference for Tinker Bell in their 1953 feature Peter Pan.

Animator Marc Davis brought in pantomime actor Margaret Kerry to pose with larger than life props.

Footage of her kicking a feather pillow informed a scene where she kicked a dandelion. Animators put reference films into a frame-by-frame viewer to study timing, spacing, and action.

While the reference helped make the action more believable, Marc Davis kept the look of the character aligned with his imagination.

The Disney Studios were using filmed reference in their earliest features, such as Snow White and Pinocchio. (Link to video on YouTube) But the impression they usually gave in their behind-the-scenes marketing was that they merely sketched from living models. They did that, too, but it's only fairly recently that the photos of the early video reference have come to light. 

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Previously: Cinderella's Live Action Reference

Tinker Bell's Live Action Origin

Via Ronnie del Carmen

Walk Cycle in 10 Poses

Here's Clement's replacement-animation walk cycle in 10 poses. I hand sculpted them from two-part epoxy over wood and wire skeletons. The bigger Clement is a rod puppet version for closeups.

Workshop at DreamWorks Animation

Yesterday I gave a slide presentation at DreamWorks Animation about imaginative realism and worldbuilding. 

Afterward, about 18 DreamWorks artists joined me in the Artistic Development room to pick up some art supplies and we headed outside to do some plein-air concept art. 

Each artist brought a toy figurine of their choice, and the challenge was to enlarge the toy and place it in a real-life scene. 

Jasmine Truong did this drawing of a giant cat, quietly overlooking one of the other artists. 

Hejung Park with Beargguy on the Jack-in-the-Box

The artists were from various departments, including visual development, lighting, story, and matte painting.

Nicolas Weis with a Collecta Guidraco popping out of the Jack-in-the-Box

We sat in the shadows of an alley behind a fast-food restaurant and exchanged sketching tips. I think I learned just as much from them as they did from me.

Visual Development Artist Iuri Lioi's frog giant rules the drive-up window.

This is a famous Jack-in-the-Box, referenced by Frank Zappa in the lyrics of the song "Billy the Mountain." According to Zappa, it is positioned "right over the SECRET UNDERGROUND DUMPS —right near the 'Jack-In-The-Box' on Glenoaks..."

Onesimus Nuernberger's giant mech outside the Carl's Jr.

"...— where they keep the POOLS OF OLD POISON GAS, and OBSOLETE GERM BOMBS." Perhaps that explains the where the oversize fantasy characters are coming from.

Sondra Verlander's plush bear waiting for takeout.

A few local business owners and residents came over to check out what we were doing as we worked for about an hour and a half.

I brought along my little stop-motion character named Otis the Ocelot, propping him just above the sketch easel so that he'd be in the same light as the background.

Here's my demo painting in gouache over a casein underpainting. 

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Thanks to all the artists for sharing your amazing creativity and sense of fun, and thanks to Anneliese of Artistic Development for making this dream-working magic possible.