A cel of the Mayor without a background, so I created one to match the scene from the special.

I prefer framing cels of animations with backgrounds that give better context of the scene they’re from. This means having to find the scene from the special and recreating it in Photoshop, then printing it so they can be framed together. Below is a bit of the process involved in creating the background for this animation cel of the Mayor.

Original drawing for the frame.
Painted cel used in the scene.
Corresponding scene from A Cosmic Christmas

You can see that the painted part of the cel is actually smaller than the scene used in the special. They would have zoomed in and cropped in on the scene so what’s outside wasn’t showing. But the cel as painted has a lot of space around it, so sometimes it means making up detail to fill up the space. That’s what happened here. Looking at the scenes around the shot, assumptions can be made and painted to match, more or less, what that scene would have been if extended.

Final background printed to place behind the painted cel before framing.

I made an animated gif below to show the various stages of the background being put together, from original sketch, to cel, to screenshot from the special, then painting a rough approximation of the background, the fine tuning it and making it look more like the original. It’s not perfect, but it looks like it fits.

Animate gif of the layers put together to build the final framed version, from original drawing to final frame.
Final framed version as it hangs on the wall.