Wills said, “I want the finished paintings to look exactly like the keys.” Each key was painted in high detail - then Wills personally scanned and color-corrected them all on his computer. Precision was what made Samurai Jack different.
They also made a number of finished backgrounds “to demonstrate the final technique,” Wills noted. Wills, Gase-Baker and others painted these. Wills wrote that he and Tartakovsky went through each episode’s storyboard to “pick which shots need a color key” - small paintings that guided the overseas artists’ work on the final backgrounds.
The team needed to direct the painters as closely as possible. Yet the show’s fate hung on the quality of the backgrounds, and on tuning their colors to make the cast of lineless characters stand out on the screen. That meant a language barrier, a timezone gap and a huge distance (and no Zoom - it was the early 2000s). The majority of Samurai Jack ’s final backgrounds were painted at Rough Draft Korea.
SAMURAI JACK POSTER SERIES
Although Wills got critical help from Jenny Gase-Baker and artists like Bill Wray and Nadia Vurbenova-Mouri, they had no way to make enough backgrounds for a whole TV series without outsourcing. The challenge was that the team was shooting for “feature quality” on a TV schedule and budget. Some of Wills’ final backgrounds - courtesy of his portfolio Wills considered it softer, more textured and more alive than digital at that time. Like Krall, the painters worked in physical media. We’ve a lot of influences, I have to say, but when I feel like I’ve done a painting that’s very Samurai Jack, the way I want it, it’s mostly Harper’s kind of feeling. But Wills noted one influence as supreme - the painter Charley Harper. Wills, for his part, tried to blend Hanna-Barbera with “Japanese prints and posters.” Tartakovsky oversaw their work and was looking at things like 1950s Disney artwork, UPA and The Little Prince and the Eight-Headed Dragon. The origin of the backgrounds’ style was a mishmash. The backgrounds freely switched between realism and pure design, Wills said. Krall sketched them on paper, going for what he called a “flat, sort of a surreal look.” He often ignored perspective, only to bring it back for certain shots. Wills formed a team with artist Dan Krall, responsible for the black-and-white background layouts. “‘Cause when Scott started to paint, all of a sudden, we had lighting, we had mood and atmosphere.” “It really came together when Scott Wills came aboard,” Tartakovsky remembered. But he’d been feeling stifled, and Tartakovsky told him that the show would switch styles and locations frequently. “Whether you’re a painter or an animator, no one leaves features to go to TV - it’s unheard of,” Wills later said. Tartakovsky’s pitch was a little unrealistic. Wills was a painter at DreamWorks, doing backgrounds for feature films like The Road to El Dorado. Searching for “someone extraordinary” to supervise the backgrounds, according to the book Makin’ Toons, Tartakovsky reached out to Scott Wills.
SAMURAI JACK POSTER FULL
Lou Romano ( The Incredibles ) did environment work for it, but didn’t continue onto the full series. These ideas were already at play in the original animation test for Samurai Jack, made around 2000. Color keys by Jenny Gase-Baker (top), Scott Wills (bottom left) and Bill Wray - courtesy of their portfolio pages
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