question: How did old hand-drawn animation achieve such consistent color?
comment: Speed and skill. Each pencil drawing by an animator was traced in ink on to a transparent sheet. Once the ink dried it was sent to painting where the paint was applied to the BACK of the transparent film. Each section of color had to be completed quickly while the paint was still very wet so it would show no brushstrokes or the cel was ruined, but going outside the lines would also ruin a cel, as even though it would not obscure the line, it would still show the color in the next section over. In the golden age of Disney the ink and paint department was a fleet women who's only job was to trace or paint. The inking girls were considered to be a higher caliber than the painting girls, as their work required a more steady hand, but the painting girls were amazing in their own right. One of the greatest accomplishments of that department was maintaining consistency in color and positioning on Snow White's blushed cheeks, which were done with *actual blush.* The effect was so time consuming it was never used again. They stuck to solid colors from then on out. Edit: I have been corrected below. The use of actual blush is an urban legend. The effect was achieved no less amazingly with a dye applied to each cel by a very talented woman from inking named Helen Ogger. See the post correcting me below for more detail.
passages: The xerographic method was first tested by Disney in a few scenes of "Sleeping Beauty" and was first fully used in the short film "Goliath II", while the first feature entirely using this process was "One Hundred and One Dalmatians" (1961). The graphic style of this film was strongly influenced by the process. Some hand inking was still used together with xerography in this and subsequent films when distinct colored lines were needed. Later, colored toners became available, and several distinct line colors could be used, even simultaneously. For instance, in "The Rescuers" the characters' outlines are gray. White and blue toners were used for special effects, such as snow and water.
   BULLET::::- "Mi-Mi, the Lazy Kitten" from China and "Tillie, the Unhappy Hippopotamus" from Czechoslovakia as shown on the Saturday morning kids' show the "CBS Children's Film Festival" which aired from 1967 to 1984. "Mi-Mi" used bright-colored pastels set against a white background while "Tillie" used a variety of different shades of yellows, greens, and grays in a paisley design even before the latter became popular in the 1970s.
   By the early 1990s, even though the larger comics publishers were using computers, there were variations within the field. DC Comics allowed only a 64-color palette, while Marvel had expanded it to 125 colors. Dark Horse Comics allowed even more variations. The dominant programs in use during that time were Color Prep and Tint Prep, both originally implemented by Olyoptics. This software was invented and written by "Pixel Craft", the first company to create software that used a personal computer that could output files for a digital image setter to make negatives for color printing. Pixel craft was a small company in Long Island, NY, created by Kenneth Giordano, and Khouri Giordano. The Father and son team went on to accomplish many first in the computerization of color print.. In 1993, Image Comics' use of computer color and more advanced color separation technology propelled DC and Marvel to further upgrade their coloring techniques. Finally, in the mid-1990s, Digital Chameleon's facility with Adobe Photoshop helped make that program the industry standard.
   Colorist Steve Oliff and his company Olyoptics were one of the first to use computers to do color separations. Although other companies at the time were experimenting with computers, Oliff and his crew were the first to blend the color guide artist with the separator. In 1987, the Japanese manga "Akira" was in preparation to be translated and published by Marvel Comics's Epic Comics line. Oliff was chosen as the colorist, and he convinced Marvel that it was time to try computer color. After the publication of "Akira" in 1988, computer coloring became increasingly prevalent in the comics industry.
   While the animation is being done, the "background artists" will paint the sets over which the action of each animated sequence will take place. These backgrounds are generally done in gouache or acrylic paint, although some animated productions have used backgrounds done in watercolor or oil paint. Background artists follow very closely the work of the background layout artists and color stylists (which is usually compiled into a workbook for their use) so that the resulting backgrounds are harmonious in tone with the character designs.
  
  Section::::Process.:Traditional ink-and-paint and camera.
   Artistic tone
  
  Tone in an artistic context refers to the light and dark values used to render a realistic object, or to create an abstract composition. When using pastel, an artist may often use a colored paper support, using areas of pigment to define lights and darks, while leaving the bare support to show through as the mid-tone.
   It proved difficult to add color to Snow White's and the queen's face.. Eventually they found a red dye that worked, and which was added with a small piece of cotton wrapped around a tipple pencil on each individual cel. Helen Ogger, an employee at the ink department, was also an animator and decided to use the same system used in animation. The method was so time consuming that it was never used again on the same scale. It was also used to a smaller degree in "Pinocchio" and "Fantasia", but after Ogger left the studio in 1941 there were nobody with the same skills who could replace her.
   Section::::Early history (1850s–early 1970s).:Munsell.
  
  Albert Henry Munsell (1858–1918) is famous for inventing the Munsell color system, one of the first color order systems created. An American painter and art teacher at the Massachusetts Normal Art School, he had visited the tapestry works of Chevreul and studied color in France. With the use of his own unique inventions, including the Photometer that measures object luminance, Munsell started to determine color spaces and standardize the way color was organized and defined. 
   When designing color book covers Obata assigned colors to characters to "get the atmosphere right". Obata assigned clear or "lack of a color" to Light.
  
  Section::::Creation and conception.:Films.
   Colorist
  
  In comics, a colorist is responsible for adding color to black-and-white line art. For most of the 20th century this was done using brushes and dyes which were then used as guides to produce the printing plates. Since the late 20th century it is most often done using digital media, with printing separations produced electronically.
  
  Although most American colorists work directly for comics publishers (either as employees or freelancers), there are a few coloring studios which offer their services to publishers. American Color, Olyoptics, Digital Chameleon were the companies notable in this field.
  
  Section::::History.
   The improvements in the technology used for coloring have had a great impact on the way comics are drawn. Before the use of computers, artists would often use the pen or brush to put in detailed shading effects; now the artist is more likely to leave the drawing open and leave it to the colorist to insert shading through variation in color tones or through adding a layer of translucent black. Most contemporary colorists work in digital media using tools.
  
  Section::::Notable colorists.
  
  BULLET::::- Jack Adler
  
  BULLET::::- Marina Amaral
  
  BULLET::::- David Baron
  
  BULLET::::- Josette Baujot
  
  BULLET::::- Jordie Bellaire
  
  BULLET::::- Jeromy Cox
   It is at this stage of the cartoon production that Pinton craftsmen prove their expertise in mixing colours to the best effects. Through constant exchanges between painters, weavers and the original artist, rope of coloured threads of different hues is made up to match the cartoon palette so to become a reference for the weaver.
  
  Section::::Ateliers Pinton.:The Horizontal Loom.
   The animated segment in Winsor McCay's "Little Nemo" (1911) was probably the first animation to use more hand-drawn images than the 700 images of Reynaud's "Un Bon Bock". While most early animations were black and white, a version of "Little Nemo" was hand-colored by McCay. Winsor McCay also used short loops of repeated images in several films, which is quite similar to Reynaud's technique of moving the film back and forth during projection.
   Colorist John Higgins used a template that was "moodier" and favored secondary colors. Moore stated that he had also "always loved John's coloring, but always associated him with being an airbrush colorist", which Moore was not fond of; Higgins subsequently decided to color "Watchmen" in European-style flat color. Moore noted that the artist paid particular attention to lighting and subtle color changes; in issue six, Higgins began with "warm and cheerful" colors and throughout the issue gradually made it darker to give the story a dark and bleak feeling.
  
  Section::::Art and composition.:Structure.
   The color schemes for the characters were decided upon by color designer Idumi Hirose. Due to the constant changes in time and location throughout the series, Hirose said that they sometimes had to use 20 to 30 different color schemes for each character in a single episode. Furuhashi requested that the "color trace" method, a coloring method wherein the solid black outlines are replaced by colored outlines, be used on the clothing of aristocratic female characters.
  
  Section::::Production.:Music.
   The earliest surviving animated feature film is the 1926 silhouette-animated "Adventures of Prince Achmed", which used colour-tinted film. It was directed by German Lotte Reiniger and French/Hungarian Berthold Bartosch. Bartosch created depth of field by putting scenographic elements and figures on several levels of glass plates with illumination from below and the camera vertically above. Later on a similar technique became the basis of the multiplane camera.
  
  Section::::Traditional animation.:1924-1928 Introduction of synchronized sound.
  
  Section::::Traditional animation.:1924-1928 Introduction of synchronized sound.:Song Car-Tunes.
   In the last half of the 20th century, Norman McLaren, who was one of the pioneers in animated movies, made several animated films in which he directly hand-painted the images, and in some cases, also the soundtrack, on each frame of the film. This approach was previously employed in the early years of movies, late 19th and early 20th century. One of the precursors in color hand painting frame by frame was the Aragonese Segundo de Chomon, that worked with Melies.
  
  Tinting was gradually replaced by natural color techniques.
  
  Section::::Physics of light and color.
   Once the clean-ups and in-between drawings for a sequence are completed, they are prepared for photography, a process known as "ink-and-paint." Each drawing is then transferred from paper to a thin, clear sheet of plastic called a "cel," a contraction of the material name celluloid (the original flammable cellulose nitrate was later replaced with the more stable cellulose acetate). The outline of the drawing is inked or photocopied onto the cel, and gouache, acrylic or a similar type of paint is used on the reverse sides of the cels to add colors in the appropriate shades. In many cases, characters will have more than one color palette assigned to them; the usage of each one depends upon the mood and lighting of each scene. The transparent quality of the cel allows for each character or object in a frame to be animated on different cels, as the cel of one character can be seen underneath the cel of another; and the opaque background will be seen beneath all of the cels.
   While at the Disney studio, he discovered while working on "Hawaiian Holiday"'s crab sequence an animation method that involved stewing for multiple days, before drawing the entire thing in rough sketches all at once, straight ahead. He was a lead animator on "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs", animating arguably the most well-known sequence in the film, the animation of the dwarves marching home singing "Heigh-Ho". The scene took Culhane and his assistants six months to complete. During this time he developed his "High-speed" technique of animating with quick dashed-off sketches.
   The colourist or colorist adds colours to the finished artwork, which can have an effect on mood and meaning. Colourists can work with a variety of media, such as rubylith, paints, and computers. Digital colorists may employ a Flatter to assist them.
  
  Section::::Division of labour.:Letterer.
   In the interview on "The Screen Savers", Burns described the use of machinima techniques to film the show thus: "It's like normal animation but instead of, y'know, sitting down, drawing everything by hand, we just use controllers." During the earlier seasons, Ramsey developed a technique to handle the gamepad with his foot in case more than four characters were in the scene.
   These colorization methods were employed until effective color film processes were developed. During the late 1960s and the early 1970s, black-and-white "Betty Boop", "Mickey Mouse", and "Looney Tunes" cartoons were redistributed in color. Supervised by Fred Ladd, color was added by tracing the original black-and-white frames onto new animation cels, and then adding color to the new cels in South Korea. To cut time and expense, Ladd's process skipped every other frame, cutting the frame rate in half; this technique considerably degraded the quality and timing of the original animation, to the extent that some animation was not carried over or mistakenly altered. The most recent redrawn colorized black-and-white cartoons are the Fleischer Studios/Famous Studios' "Popeye" cartoons, the Harman-Ising "Merrie Melodies", and MGM's "The Captain and the Kids" cartoons, which were colorized in 1987 for airing on the Turner networks. With computer technology, studios were able to add color to black-and-white films by digitally tinting single objects in each frame of the film until it was fully colorized (the first authorized computer-colorizations of B&W cartoons were commissioned by Warner Bros. in 1990). The initial process was invented by Canadian Wilson Markle and was first used in 1970 to add color to monochrome footage of the moon from the Apollo program missions.
   Character Designers Carter Goodrich, Carlos Grangel and Nicolas Marlet worked on setting the design and overall look of the characters. Drawing on various inspirations for the widely known characters, the team of character designers worked on designs that had a more realistic feel than the usual animated characters up to that time. Both character design and art direction worked to set a definite distinction between the symmetrical, more angular look of the Egyptians versus the more organic, natural look of the Hebrews and their related environments. The Backgrounds department, headed by supervisors Paul Lasaine and Ron Lukas, oversaw a team of artists who were responsible for painting the sets/backdrops from the layouts. Within the film, approximately 934 hand-painted backgrounds were created.
   The methods mentioned above describe the techniques of an animation process that originally depended on cels in its final stages, but painted cels are rare today as the computer moves into the animation studio, and the outline drawings are usually scanned into the computer and filled with digital paint instead of being transferred to cels and then colored by hand. The drawings are composited in a computer program on many transparent "layers" much the same way as they are with cels, and made into a sequence of images which may then be transferred onto film or converted to a digital video format.
   The first film colorization methods were hand done by individuals. For example, at least 4% of George Méliès's output, including some prints of "A Trip to the Moon" from 1902 and other major films such as "The Kingdom of the Fairies", "The Impossible Voyage", and "The Barber of Seville" were individually hand-colored by Elisabeth Thuillier's coloring lab in Paris. Thuillier, a former colorist of glass and celluloid products, directed a studio of two hundred people painting directly on film stock with brushes, in the colors she chose and specified; each worker was assigned a different color in assembly line style, with more than twenty separate colors often used for a single film. Thuillier's lab produced about sixty hand-colored copies of "A Trip to the Moon", but only one copy is known to exist. The first full-length feature film made by a hand-colored process was "The Miracle" of 1912.
  