The Great Blue Pencil mystery

Hey all.  Merry Christmas season to you all.  I wanted to write a quick journal to hit on two things, a question I've gotten often and to share a link to an interview I did recently.  

First, the link to the interview: www.leewiart.com/WebPages_A/st…
It's a short interview, but has lots of pictures.  I did it for my friend in China, Su.  Great guy and a great artist.  Its for a video game design contest in China that I, along with some great artists from around the world, will be judging in the new year.  

Second.....the Great Animator Blue pencil mystery:

I got this question from Aaron recently:

"I notice animators like you and Andreas Deja use a blue pencil and then go over it with black. What's the advantages (or reasons) of doing that instead of just going straight for it like something Glen Keane usually does? Also, is the black you go over with a Col-Erase too?"

Here's the history of why animators use colored pencils for their "underdrawings" in animation:  It all started long ago- like in the 40s- with the early animators.  The simple version is that graphite (average black) pencils smear.  When you are animating a scene, you are moving fairly fast to "feel" the movement as much as possible (though the animation process is actually like watching grass grow).  The second reason is that graphite pencils are DARK and often times stain the paper and don't erase well (more smearing).  It's not that big of a deal to have a "messy" drawing in animation, but it is a problem when "ghost images" (stuff you erased but can still be seen) start popping up on the page and making your pencil tests hard to make out.  Someone along the way (I'm gonna say it was Disney animator Freddy Moore, but it probably wasn't) discovered that using a colored pencil- especially a blue pencil- was a great way to knock out the first pass of your animation then you could go over it with graphite AFTER Walt approved the movement/acting.  Then, there's the third reason: the advent of the "xerox" cel process around the time of 101 Dalmations.  Before that, the drawings were hand inked over the tight clean up drawings, essentially making the drawings trash after they had been inked onto cels.  With the "xerox" process of essentially photocopying the cleaned up drawings onto cels (then the painters painted the back of the cels), the actual animator's (actually their clean up assistant's) line was being used as the final line in the film.  This made the linework produced by the clean up staff especially important.  People like me and your parents can tell you that in the early days of photocopy machines, they were crude and couldn't "see" much more than pure black lines.  One thing that worked in the favor of the new process was that the machines couldn't pick up the color blue (especially light blue pencil).  This made the process of creating animation drawings in a color like blue as your underdrawing (or "searching" sketch) even more practical.  You could then do that "tie down" step last, in nice bold graphite and that's all the machine would pick up.  Later on, the machines became better and better and we (Disney) started exploring Red pencils and other colors.  They found they could apply a filter to the photocopy machine that would knock out most all colored lines.  This made it possible to use colors other than blue, which was nice.  Then at one point, (and maybe because Disney and other studios were buying so many pencils) Prismacolor came out with the COL-ERASE pencil which was an eraseable colored pencil.  Since they are waxier than graphite, they don't smudge as much and with the ability to erase them that brand has become the norm in animation.  Even when I'm not animating, I draw with them because they are so nice and I'm used to them.  This has become the "long version" answer, so I'm gonna let this end here.  I hope this answers more questions than it creates!  Best to you, Tom B.