DIY Animation Cels

If you’re as much of a fan of classical animation as I am, you’ve probably always wanted an original animation cel. Unfortunately, prices for real cels can be in the thousands of dollars, so instead I’m going to show you a cheap and easy way to recreate your favourite scenes at home. You can screenshot a scene from anything you like, regardless of animation style, or even draw your own sketches to paint!

Supplies:

- Acrylic paints (I personally recommend vinyl acrylic, as it’s more opaque and still easy to clean. Regular acrylic works equally well. You will need to paint more coats for lighter colours)

- Clear Acetate sheets (I buy A4 overhead projector sheets, they’re cheap and work very well. Ensure they are rated for your printer, like laser or inkjet, as they can melt and jam if mismatched)

- Assorted brushes

- Light pad, or a window

- Sketch pad, pencils and pens (for tracing)

- Printer (I use a laser printer, but you can buy acetate sheets for inkjet too. I personally like using laser for the cleaner lines, and less chance of the lines scratching off)

- Photo scanner, camera

Recommend supplies:

- Cotton gloves (They’re cheap and ensure no micro scratches or finger marks make it onto the cel, making for a cleaner final product)

- More paint! (I experiment using super opaque fabric paints for the whites and light colours. They can be expensive, but if you don’t want to put down 4 layers of paint, they can be very useful)

- Plastic syringes (Good for measuring paint if you are doing an animation and need to replicate one colour a lot. These can be bought online inexpensively)

Find a scene from your favourite animation that you wish to replicate! Once you have your scene, print it off and use some sketching pencils and your light source to trace the lines of the main image in the foreground.

Once you have finished tracing out your image, outline the image with a pen to make the lines clear. Use coloured pens to match the paint colour, helping the image blend better. If you’re not the greatest line artist, you can use photo editing software to clean up the lines and fix imperfections. You can also use it to colour the lines to match the original scene, instead of using pens.

Back before the 1960’s, animation was an entirely manual operation done by artists and animators. Lines were painted in colour to better blend with the paint put onto the cel. When more modern xerographic printing came about, the technology was very primitive and the only colour that could be printed was black, but it did save a lot of labour time. Xerographic techniques were used up into the 1990’s, and printing methods were further improved by the use of computers and digital printing, giving artists the ability to colour lines again. A great example from each of these three eras are shown below:

First is Cinderella (1950), which was all hand drawn and painted.

Second is 101 Dalmatians (1961), the first xerographic (printed) feature film animation. Notice the very heavy black outlines.

Third is Aladdin (1992), line colour has returned through the use of modern digital printing methods.

Once you are happy with your tracing either scan (recommended) or take a picture of your drawing on a clean white surface, you can use a pane of glass to flatten the image to stop it curling up. Using your photo editing software of choice, make sure the background is completely removed and any sketch lines left over are cleaned up with use of an erase tool. The more time spent cleaning the line work, the better the final product will be.

Once your image is ready, place an acetate sheet into your printer, set print DPI to maximum, and set your print setting to use glossy paper or photo paper if the option exists. The size of your cel is up to you. I prefer to work with A5, as this gives me a large enough image to enjoy, but not use too much paint, or take too long to make.

Mixing the paint colours in the hardest part of the whole process. It takes a bit of practice to get right, and you may need to paint a test sheet to compare colours before even painting the cel. You can also print off a colour page at a local printing shop with true colour digital printing on photo paper. It costs me about 5c a photo and works well. I usually take all the main colours in the scene and put them into a grid so it’s easy to see them, then from there I can mix my paints to match easily.

Always mix paints in good light and against a white background or paint tray. I also use a colour mixing website like www.trycolors.com to show me a rough estimation of what colours I need to mix together. Don’t mix according to the percentages, darker colours have a lot of bearing over the colour. If it says use 30% black try using 3% instead.

If you are mixing a lot of one colour for use on multiple cels over many days/weeks, I use medical syringes bought inexpensively online. You can measure how much of one colour you use in a mix and copy that pattern to get it pretty close every time.

Do not try and dry a cel quickly, use of a heat lamp or hair dryer will cause the acetate to warp, bend and melt. Slow and steady is the way to go.

If you’re not happy with the colour, you can always restart, I wasn’t happy with the hair colour in the first two attempts at this cel, as the red colours tend to dry darker then what they look like wet. On my first attempt it wasn’t until I put the skin colour on that the hair didn’t look correct. After some more mixing I am happy with this final colour.

Time for paint! This, in my opinion, is where the cel comes alive. Painting is slow, but very satisfying to do. A few things to keep in mind when painting is to remember, PAINT ON THE BACK. You are painting the opposite side to what you want to see. If you paint on the side you want to see, it will result in a backwards finished product (trust me, I’ve done it myself). Another thing to keep in mind is to paint everything in layers as they are seen. It is easier to paint the mouth, eyes and sometimes hair before the skin colour. This way, you can just paint over them and you don’t have to worry about keeping in the lines. An example of this is shown above:

Once all the paint has been applied, your cel is now complete! You can use a fine razor blade to scrape off any overrun and imperfections. You can now print off or make your own background for the cel, if you wish to mount it or give it as a gift for someone. Again, printing off photo paper works well for this.

I hope this encourages you to create your own cels, and if you want to continue this and make a proper 2D animation; just repeat all the above steps 24 times per second of footage you wish to create. Remember Disney’s Fantasia (1940) had over 100,000 individual cels all hand drawn! Really makes you appreciate traditional animation.