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Original sketch or CEL???

Looking at some warner bros early 90's looney tunes art. Trying to decide between a original sketch or a limited edition cel. which would you rather have and why?

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Permalink Reply by Joey Farino on May 23, 2012 at 8:57pm

can i get some kind of opinion?????

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Permalink Reply by Rich on May 23, 2012 at 9:29pm

Being that this is an autograph forum, I'm not sure who our resident expert on animation art would be. Plus we'd have to know what we're comparing. Who did the sketch? What's it of? From what show/movie? Likewise, we'd have to have some details on the sericel/limited edition cel. How many were made? Was it signed by the artist?

But, on a whim, I would think that a sketch that was part of an actual TV/Film pre-production would be decidedly more desirable, as it has the distinction of being more unique. I haven't paid attention to animation art for years, but I don't remember many limited edition cels outside of Disney products being particularly interesting or valuable or of all that high of quality.

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Permalink Reply by Dennis Wiener on September 7, 2012 at 2:18pm

Sketch or production cel? The cels themsleves were usually traced from pencil drawings like this (pardon the bad scan)
Production cels were the colored acetates filmed for the actual cartoon. During the height of the collecting boom in the 80's the studios and artists were selling signed production cels and limited edition signed "scene" cels. The scene cels were signed and numbered but were never used in any actual cartoons. I collected quite a bit in the early 80's both signed and unsigned production cels. The only scene cel I purchased was a Rocky and Bullwinkle with Boris and Natasha signed by Jay Ward, because I was a big fan of that show growing up. Believe it or not my favorites of all the ones I own are the pencil drawings. Some of my favorites are some Japanese animes where I was able to buy both the pencil drawing and its partner production cel. There are also a lot of serigraphs out there which I would stay away from unless you really like it and want it for decoration. As with any kind of art which can be totally subjective buy something because you like it, and not as an investment. But personally I'd prefer the production cels which usually contain only one character- though some times they may sandwich 2 or more cels together to put multiple characters in one frame. Remember that film is shot at 24 frames per second and so there were thousands of cels drawn for each cartoon