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Hello and welcome to the Animation Art Wiki! This is a small project that a few production animation art collectors started in an effort to preserve as much of the "communal" knowledge related to this hobby as possible. It is still very much a work in progress...

We're always happy to find people who feel as passionate as we do about animation art collecting and want to contribute to the wiki. If you'd like to be an Editor, just comment on this page. (Feel free to include a little introduction about yourself if you wan...

Backgrounds are usually drawn and painted with watercolor or gouache paint. Acrylic is not normally used for backgrounds because it has a nasty habit of sticking to itself and thus might stick to and damage the paint on cels. Backgrounds are a specialized fiel...

Cels (celga/セル画) are the finished product of the animation process.  A cel is made from transferring dougas (finished pencil drawings) onto a clear sheet of acetate by various methods such as xerox or more rarely they may be hand painted. They are then painted...

These are the cels that make up the opening of the show. Most shows have 1 opening that is animated per season and then the sequence is reused for every episode. The same applies to End credits. Only one set of cels is made for each opening or ending.  These c...

An END cel (marked with either END/ E/ or the kanji 止) is the last cel in an animation sequence. A1END cel setups are sometimes referred to as Tome/止 cels. When a cel is marked with a letter A/B/C/E..+ 1 + END/E/止 then that means it is the only cel for that pa...

A bank cel refers to a cel that is used/filmed repeatedly rather than remade for every instance that it is needed. A good example is a cel used in a opening or ending sequence.  Other notable uses for bank cels are for the transformation or attack sequences in...

In many anime series', there is a commercial break about halfway through the episode (depending on its length).  To demarcate these breaks, sometimes a quick animation will play. These are often repeated throughout a season.  In some cases—Sailor Moon is an ex...

Book cels usually refer to a full setup of multiple layers including backgrounds.  The setup will include the main background, the characters or character involved in the scene, and then another layer that is actually part of the background. The example below ...

A backlit cel is a type of special effects cel.  The typical way to figure out if your cel is backlit, is, when you look at the back of your cel the paint on the back has been covered with another layer of black acrylic paint.  This was done so that when they ...

Kabuse cels (also known as correction layers) are layers added to fix mistakes in the original cel painting. These mistakes can be anything from using the wrong color to messing up the painted cel itself. Depending on the scene, budget, and animation procedure...

Special Effects cels refers any cels made to create special effects. This includes airbrushing and other methods like backlighting/masking.

Pan or oversized cels are larger-than-normal cels which are used for a panning effect. "Pan" is short for "panoramic" and refers to how the camera has to pan/travel across the frame to reveal more of the image.  Pan cels can be horizontally, vertically, and so...

Harmonies are traditionally highly sought after cels, as they area made differently from the traditional cel.  In the case of a harmony there is little to no paint on the cel and only lines on the acetate, and the colors are traditionally only painted on the b...

Hanken cels are super rare one of kind cels made for use in for in promotional items like magazines, cards, merchandise, posters, calendars, etc. They are usually made by an animation director, character designer, or senior animator. Hanken cels are usually ha...

Like settei/character models, model cels are references that help a film/series remain consistent. While character models define how a character should look, model cels define what color(s) they should be. These cels are often simple and may feature one or sev...

This type of art is created and used during the pre-production phase of a project; often when the production committee is deciding whether to give it the green light.  This may include: proposals, cels, sketches, and painted art.  Disney has been known to use ...

Douga (動画) roughly translates to moving image and is sometimes translated into "video". Douga are the cleaned up/polished versions of genga sketches.  During the animation process genga ( key frame drawings) are made and then in the next step are sent to the d...

The genga (原画) step takes the rough movements and polishes them into more detailed sketches these are drawn and redrawn again and again as needed, at this step the Key animator will work closely with the animation director to get the exact key points in the mo...