10 Essential Art Supplies for the Traditional Animator

For a bit more manual work, there's color pencils, pastels, watercolors, and markers; you'd want to use these more for your backgrounds. Backgrounds are done on the same size paper as your animation, and static backgrounds for a single motion sequence only have to be drawn once so that you can lay transparencies over them.

I have to say that watercolors really aren't my gig; I don't have the patience for them and the most time that I spend with a brush is when practicing the sort of traditional sumi-e painting passed down through my family. Pastels drive me nuts; too much smudge, not enough control. For my backgrounds I use colored Prismacolor markers with a clear blender to run the shades together, for a watercolor look with more control--or, more rarely, Prismacolor color pencils.