I ordered this Douga of Chi from the anime series “Chobits” last month from Anime Museum in Japan. It is my first actual piece of anime production art, and the way it is created is really quite interesting. The image above is actually a combination of the drawing on the front of piece, and the rough coloring on the back. When the paper is put on a light table, or held up in front of a light, the color comes through from the back to give an indication to the colorist of how to color the final image.
Normally this line drawing would be transfered to a piece of clear acetate and the colorist would apply the paint to the back of the cel. Very much the same way this drawing was done. Chobits is a computer generated production, however, so the coloring is all done on computers and no cels are ever made. It is interesting though, that they seem to do the line drawings by hand, and scan them into the computer for coloring. Perhaps this practice is to prevent the animation from looking too “CG”.
This is the line drawing on the front of the piece:
Chi Douga Front
This is the rough coloring on the back:
Chi Douga Back
Hat Tip: Alan Baker for help with combining the two scans in Photoshop!
That’s pretty cool. I usually enjoy finding out how some of this stuff is done as much as watching the end result. In this case we find that even though the end result is “new media” they have a firm start in “old media.”
I guess you just can’t replace the pen and paper, after all it still provides force feedback which seems to be crucial to the artist and many joysticks struggle to accomplish correctly.
I’m do love Chobits
Great effort to put them altogether.