This process of traditional inking and painting includes the following steps:

• Clean up of paper drawings
• Inking on OHP sheets (tracing of paper drawings).
• Painting (coloring  OHP sheets).

Clean up:

Clean Animation Fram

Rough Frames

 

Once the clean-ups and in-between drawings are completed, they are prepared for inking -and-painting. Rough images have sketchy or unwanted lines, sometimes the paper have black smudge dust particles as well. So we have to clean the drawings which is a necessary step in animation production stage. A good clean drawing is easy to trace and ink the details. Clean up is essential for digital or traditional animation.

Inking:

Tracing of Characters

Tracing of Background
 

 

Tracing using Light Box

OHP Sheets (celluloid sheets)

 

Inking is tracing of paper drawings on cellulose sheets, which is now called as OHP sheets. Paper drawings are not used to ink and color, because of their opaque nature, on the other hand OHP sheets having transparency shows a number of layers below itself without blotting the ink. Hence, the animation layers are easy to be layered on each other without losing any visibility. Keeping the paper drawings under the OHP sheets mark the drawings using any permanent marker. The outlines of the drawing are replicated from paper to a thin clear sheet of plastic called a cel or a celluloid sheet. Mostly inking was done by hand but for making its less laborious process many animators also photocopy the drawings onto the cel sheets, which is a time saver.

Painting/ Coloring:

Coloring Preparation

Color palette of a character is already finalized in during preproduction. Now the colorists have a final chart of color palettes in use. The celluloid sheets have transparent quality so the colors must be spread evenly on sheet surface. With a thin brush size apply the paint thoroughly over the drawn area. Keep your OHP frame clean. Give a good time to dry the painted sheets. Each sheet involved in a frame is laid on top of the other, with the background at the bottom of the stack. The transparent quality of the sheet allows the painted object to be animated, as one layer is visible underneath the other revealing the last layer of static background. Once all the layers are clicked they are exported as final animation.

These colored sheets should be kept away from dust particles and scratches.

Preparing Color using Poster Colors Mixing Favicol

Traced Animation

 

Coloring Animation on the Reverse Side

Applying Color thoroughly over the Flat Surface