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.