The Chip and Dale Animation Cel Project

[singhcr]

You, dear friend, are bursting with questions! Whatever will I do with you? XD

1. I do not. I collect military surplus firearms and have many handguns and rifles, but the Golden Gun was a prop for the 007 movie of the same name.

2. The tablet was roughly $70 USD when I bought it two years ago.

I am a forest wolf, yes, although I do prefer to shed my clothes and run on all fours in the middle of the night in the depths of winter howling at the moon.

Tyrell is a complex wolfy XD

[singhcr]

6/22/15

Here's my first attempt at inking. The artists here really had to practice to learn how to use a tablet, just as I had to spend months learning how to sketch with a pencil and paper and my physical medium skills don't entirely translate over to the digital domain. It's not easy, folks.

[singhcr]

6/28/15

Well, the tablet is getting a little easier to use now that I'm not using my wrist 100% of the time, but I started playing with the pen tool again and when you adjust the pressure sensitivity as Sara suggested, it actually makes rather nice lines. I think a good option going forward is to use the tablet to modify or clean up anything that the pen tool didn't do the way I wanted it to. Experimentation is key, my friends... eventually, success will be attained here. C'est la vie!  

[singhcr]

6/28/15

It's nearly done... I think this will work well. The tablet can be used for any detail or cleanup work.

[singhcr]

7/5/15

There is still some cleanup and general tweaking to do, but I believe we have a foreground cel inked, ladies and gentlemen.

As always, quality is maintained. This file is 7000x4000 pixels so it will easily hold up when printed on an 8.5"x11" or a 11"x17" transparency, depending on which size I want to use. I will second what Winston said. Keep your canvas large. All my pencil scans are at 600 DPI and I will keep that size throughout the entire process to maintain high quality.

Remember: you don't lose quality making something smaller, but you do lose quality when you need to make something larger.

[singhcr]

7/11/15

Here's my first time inking my tool path lines. The pen tool does indeed work well here. Now it's time to print it to a transparency and see what the cel would look like.

There's still a bit of cleanup to do. Yes, I am aware that Dale has no tongue at the moment. That's why he can't talk right now.  

[Chipster-roo]

It was really interesting to read about the various inking methods

Using the tablet really looks complicated...I admire your perseverance, since it seems to have taken you several attempts to get it right.

I'll be looking forward to the next part of the process

[singhcr]

Thanks! I too find the inking process fascinating. Trying to ink by hand is extremely difficult. I have no idea how they did thousands of those cels!

In the end I used a vector based pen tool to ink my pencil sketches rather than trying to draw over them with a tablet.

[Acacia Heartstrings]

Thanks for answering my previous doubts, now I know that you are a well-armed wolf that lives in the forest.  

It is a rigorous work to draw and make the corresponding lines, now follows the inking. Just like the lively explanation in Tinny toons, of the animation festival.  

[singhcr]

You are welcome. I also forgot that the woods with snow on it is still a forest XD

I love that Tiny Toons episode, especially where Plucky learns how many sketches he will have to draw for the entire film. "I drew 10, how many more do I need?"

That and Buster pounding the drum to make the animators work faster XD

[Acacia Heartstrings]

You are welcome. I also forgot that the woods with snow on it is still a forest XD

I love that Tiny Toons episode, especially where Plucky learns how many sketches he will have to draw for the entire film. "I drew 10, how many more do I need?"

That and Buster pounding the drum to make the animators work faster XD

"You have to draw 5000"
That is 5000 frames in animation cells, oh my God. To create a few seconds of movement.
Now that I remember, I think Tinny toons has the record of being the series with the greatest number of frames or animation cells in history. For that reason several studios and companies worked in the series. The best was Tokyo Movie Shinsha.
Buster is an exploiter.
We hope to see the animated cell soon. good luck  

[singhcr]

7/11/15

I was very tempted to see what the final product would look like. I have to thicken up the lines a bit and play with the pressure settings, but I think the final product will turn out very, very well. I can already see that all of this hard work will be worth it!

[singhcr]

7/16/15

Well, I printed out an actual cel today. The detail is stunning and would easily hold up to an 11"x17" transparency. It looks very much like hand inking to me. I could enlarge this quite a bit if needed. All of the attention to fine detail has been preserved, and my source file is 7K so nothing is lost. I needed to make a transparency to calibrate an optical measuring device at work earlier this year and found that other than accounting for a shrink factor between my CAD model and the printout, a high quality laser printer can make very fine and accurate lines. This is what convinced me to use digital inking.

Here's a scan of the printed cel with a piece of paper underneath it.



Even blown up, the detail remains.



Times like this make me very glad to be both an artist and an engineer. I'm not letting any artistic or technical challenges get in my way. This cel is going to look absolutely gorgeous once it is painted and photographed, both artistically and technically. They are equally important qualities, as one influences the other. The possibilities are limitless!

[singhcr]

7/17/15

Color test cel...

[singhcr]

7/18/15

Foreground cel inking/color testing is done. BAM! That's how we do that, people. All the hard work here comes to an end, and the little tweaks I've made make a huge difference.

I'm one proud, satisfied wolf.  

On to the background cel...