Creating Fan Cels

I've always wanted to try this out, possibly for conventions. Not necessarily copies of classic shows, but reimaginings of current (especially CG) shows. What they would have looked like 25 years ago.

I saw some older tutorials for this, but manage to run into a couple dead ends as products have become scarcer over time.

I was originally thinking of trying to get production-size products, but considering the impractical nature of such sizes nowadays, I was also thinking of cutting down some more standard sheets into half-size or three-quarter size sheets with a similar ratio to production cels.

Any advice where to start? As I understand, most production cels were made of cellulose tri-acetate. Nowadays, art film sheets are thinner cellulose acetate. I don't mind, but I just want something durable enough for display. Would anyone recommend film rolls? I see them as a good opportunity to cut into the sizes I want.

I may end up going to the Cartoon Color Company, as it is conveniently local. They have replaced their cellulose tri-acetate with polyester, so they aren't industry-accurate anymore, but they are still meant for the job of painting cels. But I wanted to ask before I threw down a nice sum on their bulk orders. x))

(I suppose if I really wanted to be industry accurate without bulk purchases, I could go to my local cel archive and buy up a bunch of their mouth cel overlays and...no, I shouldn't.)

I've made a few fan cels. I bought a pad of acetate sheets (Grafix Dura-Lar, you can get them on Amazon) and just use the regular cheap acrylic paint that you can get at Wal-Mart and everywhere else.
The hardest thing to find was pens to make the black lines. A black DecoColor paint pen is great, and I use it for most lines, but I needed something to do much finer lines with as well. I managed to find one kind of pen that actually worked on plastic without rubbing off, from a local art supply store.

Thank you for telling me how you go about it! How does the acrylic paint look after a while? Does it sit well on the sheet?

By the way, your Inuyasha collection doesn't mess around! It is phenomenal!!

Thank you ;)

It looks just fine! It does take several layers though. Since you do have to mix the colors to get what you want, I bought a package of those little plastic paint saver cups to store the mixed paint in between layers, so that the color remained consistent. Because you will end up with tiny spots that are missed, and in some areas the paint will be very thin.

If you look at my fancel section, the very first one there named Bouncing was done by me, as well as this fine piece of work: http://thingsleftinthefridge.rubberslug.com/gallery/inv_info.asp?ItemID=397018
:P

That's great to know! I already have more than enough acrylic paint. Cartoon *Colour Company recommends its own vinyl paints, but it seems like I can still at least test the waters with the paints I already have. :))