Blue Pencil Roughs

[Keropi]

Does anyone know if there's any significance to blue pencil roughs?

I've seen these over the years, but didn't know if they were used for anything specific or any particular phase in the process.

[sensei]

Yes, I've gotten a number of "blues" (as I call them) from Toei's Powerpuff Girls Z and AIC's Sasami: Magical Girl Club. Over the years I've puzzled over them, as they are usually very good in quality and often dead-on to the genga image (when I could get the matching genga) or to a screen cap from the finished show.

Some of these guesses are up in my gallery, but I now think that they are part of the "foul papers" (preliminary and practice drawings done by the key animators) working up the image to the genga stage. That's partly because I got them in batches of sketches of all sorts, ranging from layouts to extremely rough genzu (exploratory drawings) with the occasional rough on thin yellow paper.

That suggests that they are the contents of a key animator's "circular file" or discard pile, passed on to a jobber who divided them up (often very haphazardly) for sale on the auction market. Some I got through Yahoo Japan, and some from Mandarake. Gengas and dougas, when available, came as parts of separate lots, I'd guess from a separate studio source.

Here's a good example of some PPGZ "blues" that I digitally combined into a single image:

http://sensei.rubberslug.com/gallery/in ... mID=204602

And luckily I was able to reunite them with the gengas so you can see how they relate to each other:

http://sensei.rubberslug.com/gallery/in ... mID=221114
http://sensei.rubberslug.com/gallery/in ... mID=221115

There are others in my (lightly explored) PPGZ gallery, which is visually fun and interesting in showing just what normally gets shredded and burned when an anime episode is wrapped.

[Keropi]

Hmm...that's an interesting theory. It makes sense for what I've seen from them over the years.

Thanks Sensei.