Animation Backgrounds

Here are some of my animation backgrounds from various productions in the 1990's.

I and others painted hundreds over the years, often working into the small hours to make sure we delivered on time.

Always there was a balance to be struck between speed and quality. Getting the style of the production right would take a couple of weeks at first and then I'd be away, gathering speed in my little workroom, tuned into Radio 4. It's not a job for the gregarious person perhaps but I enjoyed being cocooned in my own little world.

One of things it taught me was to think of style as superficial thing, a veneer that matters less than the substance, i.e. the idea or the drawing. But style is important too, it's just that it's sometimes used to mask weak substance.

Here's a tiny sample of my animation backgrounds, some of the few that made it to the photocopy shop on the mad dash down the Tottenham Court Road to deliver work.

These two backgrounds were from the film of the excellent book 'OI GET OFF OUR TRAIN' 

by John Burningham.  The film was made by Varga TVC.

We used acrylic ink with wax crayon over the top to 'roughen' it up.  

Of all the background styles I have done, this was my favourite from an artistic point of view.  As with most of the following images, I was art directed on this by Lorraine Marshall at Varga TVC, who was a great inspiration.

This one is an exterior from the film of the book 'FATHER CHRISTMAS' by Raymond Briggs.
The film was made by TVCartoons.  This was my first job as a background artist and I was pleased to be able to prove I could work in an unfamiliar style.
We used watercolour with pen and ink and enhanced it with coloured pencil.

The following backgrounds are from the TV series of the lovely children's books 'ANGELINA BALLERINA' by Katharine Hollabird and Helen Craig.  (The stories were so good that despite being about a girl mouse who loves ballet, all my sons enjoyed them!)  

The series was lavishly and faithfully produced at Grand Slamm Childrens Films.

                         

More coming up from this series, which was my most significant job in animation. They were all painted on stretched watercolour paper with pen and ink line work:

Here are some of the interiors from Angelina and a couple more of the exteriors:

Here are some exteriors I painted for THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS and THE WILLOWS IN WINTER, made for Carlton TV by Varga TVC.

These were done in chalk pastels - quite tricky but looked lovely and rich on screen.

And here are some more from 'THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS' and 'THE WILLOWS IN WINTER'.  The pastel medium was particularly effective in getting over the warmth of the fire.

The next three are images are either production backgrounds or tests for
THE WORLD OF PETER RABBIT AND FRIENDS, films of the books by Beatrix Potter.
These lovely films were made by various studios across London in the 1990s.

These images are medium resolution so that you can see some of the detail but I would ask you to kindly respect the copyright of the animation studios.  Thankyou.