All these BGs are from one cartoon: The Tycoon from the first season of the Flintstones.
Take a look at how striking limited palettes and even large amounts of gray can be.
These are some of the most beautiful BGs I've ever seen in cartoons. So cartoony, such unique color choices, stylized textures, yet it all feels so organic and alive. Bedrock is a place I'd love to live in.
I would kill to have this BG pan of Bedrock!
This is proof that you don't have to have big budgets to have good looking cartoons. Talent, taste and controlled choices can add up to a lot more than money and lack of controlled decision making:
This looks like the painter couldn't make up his mind what colors to use, so he just decided to use every one. Straight from the tubes and shot through a blotchy airbrush. It's definitely hard to make creative decisions, but those who can are to be highly admired!Using a lot of opposing pure colors just breaks up the image into little pieces and makes the character hard to see. It also makes the cartoon look fake. It doesn't help to not have a composition either.
Compare the texture in these trees to the textures in more cleverly painted BGs. These pine needle textures are not only blunt and sloppily painted. They completely fill the silhouettes of the trees. No creative selection has been made. "I'll just fill up the whole image equally with evenly spaced detail" is the decision that was made.
Well this has a composition and that makes it easy to read, but there are those favorite cartoon colors again!It's hard believe this image below is from a fully animated big budget feature and not a Saturday Morning cartoon. Money doesn't always buy taste.
I'm willing to bet that many artists don't have much say in the stylings of their cartoons. A lot of the decision making is likely in the hands of execs who think more detail and brighter colors equals quality.
Look what happened just 10 years later!
