With the storyboard in place, I could start to animate. Most studio animation done nowadays is animated in 3D, which doesn’t use drawings at all. But in keeping with the style of the time, I wanted to use traditional cel animation, which is extremely time- and labor-intensive: It requires making around 12 unique drawings per second of animation.

Traditionally, artists began with pencil and paper. Each drawing was then traced with ink onto a transparent sheet called a cel, and color was painted on manually. Adhering to this exact process would have meant blowing our deadline, so I cheated a little and used a digital paint program. This also allowed for instant playback; in the ‘30s, animators could only review their work after it had been photographed, one picture at a time. You can see my animation process, step by step, here.

Below is an example of a walk cycle. Characters are among the most difficult aspects of a scene to animate, due to the complexity of human movement. Because I added this sequence late in the process, I had to animate the walk backwards from Mr. Jones’ final standing position. The second image shows how I inked and colored the drawings for the walk cycle digitally.

Courtesy of Caitlin Cadieux

Courtesy of Caitlin Cadieux

I also needed to make the artwork for the backgrounds of each shot. I painted each background with black gouache, an opaque watercolor, to highlight the details and echo the watercolor backgrounds of 1930s cartoons. While today’s animation, produced digitally in 3D or 2D, is still beautiful, there is a unique richness to watercolor paintings done by hand.

Courtesy of Caitlin Cadieux

As an animator, I learned a great deal about my craft from this project. Studying the precursors of our current digital techniques has given me a greater understanding of the process as a whole. Turnarounds are tight and animation is still labor-intensive, but today we are lucky to be able to produce professional-quality animation relatively fast. By practicing the techniques of the 1930s, I think I’ve actually sped up my workflow!

—Caitlin Cadieux

Can an Artist Still Shape an Era?

Karen Yuan discusses why it may be difficult for another artist to have an impact as great as Picasso's.

When Pablo Picasso died in 1973, the painter Willem de Kooning said, “Certain artists are always with me, and surely Picasso is one of them.” Since his first exhibition in America more than a century ago, Picasso has shaped the imagination of American artists.

That first exhibit, at the photographer Alfred Stieglitz’ New York gallery in 1911, shocked Americans with Picasso’s intensely abstract Cubist works, which used geometric shapes to represent various perspectives at once. It was a new vision in art for a new time—avant-garde art was rising to prominence alongside skyscrapers and jazz. The most innovative artists in America at the time began painting Cubist works, including Marsden Hartley, one of the pioneers of modernist American art.

After his second major exhibition in America, a 40-year retrospective of his work at the Museum of Modern Art, which took place in 1939, Picasso’s impact on the art world broadened among artists. Well-known by then, Picasso startled them again with new works, including Guernica, which responded to the Spanish Civil War. At the same time, World War II was just beginning. “The sheer violence and energy of his work … Artists felt that it really connected to what was happening in the world at that moment,” said Michael FitzGerald, a Picasso scholar who curated the Whitney Museum’s 2006 exhibition on the artist’s influence on American art.