Take a look at something like pinocchio. It doesn’t look flat, it looks exquisite. But I don’t know how to achieve this without looking limited in color or very flat in coloring. What I mean is, that a lot of grease pencil works I see look very flash like, which I don’t want to achieve at all. I don’t want to look cheap.
I am not a grease pencil expert. But I think you can find the answer here:
https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/2.80/grease_pencil/materials/introduction.html
https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/2.80/grease_pencil/materials/grease_pencil_shader.html
So for example the rosy cheeks on your sample there. You would probably make that in an image editing program.
Aside from that, the example is mostly flat color with very good perspective lines and a silhouette to show form.
That and good color integration with the background which is hand painted gives you the illusion of something that has more depth.
So it is a lot of art principles that go into it to pull that off. And I can’t imagine the challenge being any different in GP.
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Keep in mind that the Pinocchio example features 2 things: Matte paining for the static/still background and the characters in the front are cell shaded/animation.
Also for the cell shading notice how the lineart is not even thickness but varies to accentuate the proportions of the characters.
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Would making all the still backgrounds in krita and then making the animated characters in grease pencil be the best way to achieve the pinocchio look?
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Pretty much, and if you look closely you will see the texture on the cell painting is not perfectly smooth. At least that copy of it looks that way. It looks like it has some subtle noise which could be achieved with an image or maybe nodes. Again this is way out of my preview. But… maybe using a noise image and then blending it with color.
Yes the noise is likely from photographing the backlit multi-layer composite since back then it was all hand drawn and photographed for final capture.
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Yeah. Makes sense. It is interesting how the limitations or the “current best practice” may have added that subtle noise which just added to the overall organic analog effect. I wonder if old Disney engineers were walking around rubbing chins and thinking… “if we could just get rid of that cell paint noise… Then the process would be perfect!”…lol
Also there is the chance it was also film grain. I wonder if original cels actually have this?
The original clean film cells were probably noise free in and of themselves.
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Here is a tut that might have some tips: