Pixel wrote: Hopefully he has treated his items better than I'm afraid I might, if only because I'm ignorant how to handle such things.
I need to find some time to do my bit in the "What Animation Art Collectors Need to Know" pulling together the threads on best practices for maintaining sketchwork. The main thing is to remove all celotape that is browning or does not appear stable. The kind that has a matte surface is better than most, and I sometimes leave it, but the Library of Congress archival standard is to get it all off. (They actually found a piece of celotape that had been put on the Declaration of Independence sometime in the 1930s to repair a rip.) Here's an old post in which I describe how to do this:
Removing adhesive tape from sketches
(BTW, I got curious once and did try the process on a cheap freebie cel and found that it doesn't work. But it also does not appear to damage the cel plastic or paint. It does remove trace lines and sequence numbers written in marker pen, so I'd still avoid trying it on any cel you plan to keep.)
Other than that, keep the art flat with a backing board to guard against accidental creasing (I get acid-free cardstock at Michaels on sale and cut it to size), store it in a good-quality plastic sleeve (Bags Unlimited sells them in quantity for hobbyists of all sorts), and as it accumulates, get an archival quality storage box (I also use Bags Unlimited.) The kind made for collectors of sheet music are a good size for animation art sketches too.
Rinkya worked pretty well, but not all the pages would load.
Rinkya is good as it does provide an "Azumanga Daioh (genga)" search. You get a fair number of false hits but several good ones. You can also go directly to Yahoo Japan and enter "原画 あずまんが大王" (Genga + Azumanga Daioh]. As the results will come back with images, you can at once sort out the items you're interested in. With a little experience you can even make sense out of the descriptions. The heading for this one:
あずまんが大王 原画 動画 20話C-144
... says you get both the gengas [原画] and the dougas [動画] for Episode 20 [20話], cut 144 [C-144].
The
gengas are the key animator's sketches for the keyframes, and the
dougas are the pencil-on-paper inbetweeners that were scanned and colorized to make the animation. There are normally about 300
cuts (or animation sequences) in a given TV episode, this this one falls right about at the eyecatch in the very middle of the show.) The description adds that you get three gengas and 25 dougas, plus the
timing sheet and the
cut bag (the brown manila envelope that the studio used to ship the animation products from division to division.
Rinkya lets you transate the pages but the results are Engrishy so you have to translate those. "Original" = genga, "Video" = douga, for instance. And things like "time cut bag filled with sheet" you have to mentally reorganize (Japanese syntax isn't like English) into "also includes time sheet and cut bag."
It looks as if the seller "santasanloved" has a number of these for sale. I recognize this source as one that specializes in sketchwork, and I've gotten several items from the same seller with no problems regarding authenticity or silverfish.
I think Azumanga Daioh may have been animated using a hybrid system of traditional cel illustrations for BG, and computer graphics for characters. Does that process sound feasible? It would certainly explain why only background cels from the show seem to exist.
I believe the backgrounds were done in watercolor (or gouache) on paper and then scanned. That makes sense given the art that later appeared for the first generation of CGI shows. I have a batch of watercolors done for
Princess Tutu, some of which were subsequently manipulated digitally, with images painted against a dark blue background cut and pasted into different positions (compare the watercolor with the screen cap for
this one and you'll see).
As I understand the process, the watercolor scan was the bottom layer of the CGI art. Then the dougas for the characters were scanned from the sheets on which they were drawn and colorized. If you look at a CGI douga, you'll find that the shading indicated highlights and shadows were done on the back, so the front contains only the tracing. The digital colorizer then would work with the douga placed on a light table for reference. These then would be layered on top of the bg scan, and any CGI effects added.
Watercolor backgrounds exist for quite a few first-gen CGI shows, including Azu. Then it became more feasible to generate the backgrounds digitally.
Mushishi was one of the first of these and won a special animation award for their innovations. Now I'd expect this is routine. But it is nice to be able to possess a full-color image from some of the series for which backgrounds were still painted on paper.
Hope this helps some. Being able to hold, inspect, and learn from actual production materials is fascinating and helps all of us better understand the creative human side of animation.