BGS: Layout, Color Key, Finished Painting

I wanted my Yogis to have some feeling of the original 195-1960 cartoons. I didn't want them to be like the 1970s, an 80s redos where the characters try to be be with the times. No cleaning up the environment or riding skateboards - and no pink purple and lime green airbrushed bgs. I got Ed Benedict to do some of the background layouts and design and he drew them in pretty much the style he drew in the 1950s. Trying to get the painting style down was tougher.
Here's a beautiful painting - I think by Richard Daskas that is sort of half Ren and Stimpy style, half early Hanna Barbera. It wasn't until Boo Boo Runs Wild that I thought we got the finished BG style to look like the Art Lozzi/ Montealegre techniques I so admire.
Here's my key. This is from a scene that was cut from Ranger Smith's Day In The Life for time. It had RS inspecting the underwater world and making sure the fish were obeying the rules of the scummy lake bottom. Even scum has to have rules and order in Smith's world.

Color Theory 14 - Painting: HB Holes and Ruff N Reddy

Hey Art, are these your BGs?

The ORIGIN OF HB's LOOK

http://www.animationarchive.org/2007/12/filmography-happy-birthday-ruff-and.html

If you wanna watch the original HB show, go watch it at Steve's site.

This episode of Ruff N Reddy has some great BGs with really imaginative techniques and colors.

They even stole Bob Clampett's Dishonest John character! I wonder what Clampett thought of that.

A+ Flintstone BGs - using neutrals and Grays between the colors

All these BGs are from one cartoon: The Tycoon from the first season of the Flintstones.
Take a look at how striking limited palettes and even large amounts of gray can be.

These are some of the most beautiful BGs I've ever seen in cartoons. So cartoony, such unique color choices, stylized textures, yet it all feels so organic and alive. Bedrock is a place I'd love to live in.
I would kill to have this BG pan of Bedrock!This is proof that you don't have to have big budgets to have good looking cartoons. Talent, taste and controlled choices can add up to a lot more than money and lack of controlled decision making:This looks like the painter couldn't make up his mind what colors to use, so he just decided to use every one. Straight from the tubes and shot through a blotchy airbrush. It's definitely hard to make creative decisions, but those who can are to be highly admired!

Using a lot of opposing pure colors just breaks up the image into little pieces and makes the character hard to see. It also makes the cartoon look fake. It doesn't help to not have a composition either.

Compare the texture in these trees to the textures in more cleverly painted BGs. These pine needle textures are not only blunt and sloppily painted. They completely fill the silhouettes of the trees. No creative selection has been made. "I'll just fill up the whole image equally with evenly spaced detail" is the decision that was made.
Well this has a composition and that makes it easy to read, but there are those favorite cartoon colors again!

It's hard believe this image below is from a fully animated big budget feature and not a Saturday Morning cartoon. Money doesn't always buy taste.

I'm willing to bet that many artists don't have much say in the stylings of their cartoons. A lot of the decision making is likely in the hands of execs who think more detail and brighter colors equals quality.Look what happened just 10 years later!

Color Theory 8 - Art Lozzi - Snorkasaurus Hunter - salmon morning

This is my preferred color thinking for cartoons. Colors and techniques that make the cartoon seem warm, real and inviting. Even though this is very stylized-not realistic, it still has much depth.
I love the colors and textures in these BGs from an episode of the Flintstones.
The underpainting level is a salmon color (the sky)
Then Art painted the other colors on top, leaving some areas transparent so that the sky color blends with the other colors.
If you look at the walls, you can see a lot of clever decision making at work.
There is a fine sponge texture between the sky layer and the more contrasted brush strokes on top.

Note the big broad brushtrokes at the edge of the round house. Those are placed deliberately around the edge-not in the middle.

CONTROL YOUR CHOICES
This is a good use of contrast and control. The strokes themselves have a lot of flair and aren't parallel-yet they still wrap around the house. The organic shapes of the strokes make the house seem real, not mechanical. Lozzi has made many creative decisions, rather than just fill his whole painting with equal amounts of texture or evenly spaced brush strokes.
Looking closely you can see that the textures and brush strokes are not the same exact color tint as the underpainting. There are all kinds of subtle tint and value variations. This keeps the picture from looking monochromatic.
There aren't any simple colors. No primaries or secondaries, and the overall effect of the clever color choices makes the environment be more colorful than the typical garish colors you see in many cartoons, both past and present.

More good stuff...Subtle variations in texture and color make the overall main color seem much richer and not so simplistic and flat as pure garish primaries and secondaries.

I love the rocks in the original Flintstones.

Is there anybody out there who can paint like this and needs a cartoon to let him?