All the backgrounds for the 1983 Bakshi / Frazetta animated film "Fire and Ice" were painted by me and Thomas Kinkade—before he became known as the "Painter of Light”.
We painted the background art with cel vinyl paint on illustration board at a rate of 11 paintings per week each. It was a grueling pace, but good training.
We used flat and round Winsor & Newton Series 7 Kolinsky brushes and Paasche Model VL dual-action airbrushes.
I enjoyed the camaraderie of the movie studio, and I have missed that feeling since. It was a thrill to watch the dailies, when we could preview snippets of the film, complete with animation and sound. We BG guys felt like we were living inside our paintings.
Frank Frazetta inspired us animators, layout people, and background painters. He would tour the building with his famous friends, like Arnold Schwarzenegger.
He would lug in stacks of his famous canvases and prop them up around the break room every once in a while. He wouldn’t talk specifics about his techniques, but he loved to sit around the background room and talk about baseball, fighting, or women.
Bakshi was fun to be around, always drawing cartoons, talking art, and razzing us. The building didn’t have a proper intercom system, so he’d yell into the ventilation system: “COFFEE!” I was near a vent, so I yelled back, "NO COFFEE." He shouted, "GET TO WORK, SLAVES!" It was meant in good spirits, and we all laughed.
Every couple weeks Tom and I would bring in a three-foot high stack of art books from Glendale's Brand library and spread them out on the counters in the background room.
One by one all the animators and layout people would come by during the breaks and we’d fire up about art and look through each other’s sketchbooks.
Once in a while we would cram paint lids into the regulators of the oxygen airbrush tanks and shoot the lids across the room like a cannon, right through a foam-core target of Mickey Mouse. We made fun of all the other studios in the 1970s and 1980s who commercialized animation and made crappy cartoons for kids.
At the end of the production, the animators packed up their things and moved on to other projects at other studios. Bakshi Productions shrunk down to just a small crew. The effort shifted to editing, sound, and and marketing. No one expected a studio job to last beyond a film.
A great team, great time and a gorgeous movie. I wish there was an artbook from the movie.
You guys are my heroes! I trained in classic animation but by the time I finished school and got work the whole local industry had shifted to cut-out animation. Still, someone had to draw the layout and background, and this was my favorite part of work. Work was hard with long hours. For a while I was in a small studio and it was fun until it wasn't.
But whenever I felt the pressure of the long hours and the immense workload I remembered "those two guys who alone painted ALL of the backgrounds to Fire and Ice". Stuff of dreams.