You know that feeling when Satsuki and Mei run through the tall grass in My Neighbor Totoro? It isn't just the character design that gets you. It’s the grass. It’s that deep, lush, impossibly humid green that feels like you could reach out and touch it. That’s the magic of Ghibli. Honestly, most people focus on Hayao Miyazaki’s storytelling or Joe Hisaishi’s tear-jerking scores, but the real soul of these films lives in the background art. Painting the worlds of Studio Ghibli isn’t just a technical job; it’s an entire philosophy of light, nature, and hand-painted imperfection that current digital studios are still desperately trying to copy.
It’s about the paint. Specifically, Nicker Poster Colour.
If you walk into the Ghibli background department, you won't see a sea of Wacom tablets. You'll see jars. Hundreds of jars of high-pigment gouache. While the rest of the world moved to Photoshop and 3D rendering, Ghibli stayed stubborn. They stuck to the physical. This choice wasn't just nostalgia. It was a commitment to a specific kind of "lived-in" reality that digital tools struggle to replicate without looking clinical.
The Secret Sauce: Why Nicker Poster Colour Matters
Most artists use watercolors or acrylics, but Ghibli’s background directors—legends like Kazuo Oga and Nizou Yamamoto—swear by Nicker. It’s a Japanese brand of poster paint that behaves like a hybrid. It’s opaque like gouache but can be thinned out to look like a delicate watercolor wash.
When Oga was painting the worlds of Studio Ghibli for Princess Mononoke, he didn’t just paint "trees." He painted the moisture in the air. He used the unique layering capabilities of this paint to create those deep, mossy cedar forests that look like they’ve existed for ten thousand years. There’s a weight to it. Because the paint has physical body, the light hits the paper and reflects off the pigment in a way that feels "heavy" and real.
Digital art is basically math disguised as color. It’s perfect. And that’s the problem. Human eyes are incredibly good at spotting perfection, and we find it boring. Or worse, uncanny. Ghibli backgrounds are full of "mistakes"—brush strokes that went a bit too wide, colors that bled into each other, the slight texture of the paper showing through. These flaws provide a psychological anchor. They tell your brain: A human was here. ### Kazuo Oga and the "Ghibli Green"
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You can't talk about these backgrounds without mentioning Kazuo Oga. He's basically the man who taught us what summer feels like. If you look at Only Yesterday or Totoro, the greens are vibrant but never neon. Oga has this insane ability to mix colors that look "dirty" on the palette but look like sunlight hitting a leaf once they’re on the board.
He famously said that he doesn't paint things; he paints the atmosphere surrounding the things. It’s a subtle distinction. If you’re painting a house, you aren’t just painting wood and stone. You’re painting the way the afternoon sun hits the wood and how the shadows in the corners are actually a cool purple, not just "darker brown." This observational rigor is what makes painting the worlds of Studio Ghibli so labor-intensive. A single background can take a week. One. Single. Frame.
Defying the Digital Shift
By the late 90s, the industry was panicking. Disney was moving toward 3D with Toy Story, and hand-drawn animation started looking like a dinosaur. But Ghibli doubled down. Even when they started using computers for compositing in Spirited Away, the backgrounds remained hand-painted.
Why? Because 3D space is often too logical.
In a Ghibli film, the perspective is often "cheated" to make you feel a certain emotion. If a character is scared, the walls might lean in just a tiny bit more than physics should allow. If a world is supposed to feel magical, like the bathhouse in Spirited Away, the colors are saturated beyond what’s natural to create a sense of overwhelming sensory input. You can do this in digital, sure, but it’s harder to make it feel organic.
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The Yamamoto Sky
Nizou Yamamoto, another titan of the studio, was the king of clouds. We call them "Yamamoto-gumo" (Yamamoto clouds). They are those massive, towering cumulus clouds you see in Castle in the Sky or The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (though that’s Mamoru Hosoda, Yamamoto brought the Ghibli DNA with him).
Most animators treat the sky as a backdrop. Yamamoto treated it as a character. His clouds have volume. They have shadows that feel like they could hide a floating city. To achieve this, he’d use a "dry brush" technique, dragging almost-dry paint across the paper to create the wispy, frayed edges of a cloud. It creates a sense of movement even in a static image.
How to Apply the Ghibli Aesthetic to Your Own Work
If you’re a painter or a digital artist trying to capture this vibe, you’ve gotta stop using the "fill" bucket. Seriously. The Ghibli look is built on layers and transparency.
- Limit your palette. Ghibli doesn’t use every color in the rainbow. They pick a mood—say, "misty morning"—and every color in that scene is filtered through a cool, desaturated blue or grey.
- Paint the light, not the object. Don't think "I am painting a red roof." Think "I am painting a red roof that is partially in shadow and partially reflecting the blue of the sky."
- Texture is your friend. If you’re working digitally, use brushes that have some "grit" or "tooth." If you’re working traditionally, don’t be afraid to let the paint be thick in some areas and paper-thin in others.
- Reference real life, not other anime. This is the big one. Miyazaki famously hates it when artists only look at other drawings. The artists painting the worlds of Studio Ghibli go outside. They look at how moss grows on a specific type of rock. They look at how a puddle reflects a power line. Realism is the foundation of fantasy.
It's kinda funny. We live in an era where AI can generate a "Ghibli-style" image in three seconds. But those images always feel... off. They’re too glossy. They don't have the soul of a background painter who spent ten hours trying to get the exact shade of a rusty gate.
The beauty of these worlds isn't in their perfection; it's in their humanity. It’s in the knowledge that someone sat at a wooden desk, dipped a brush into a jar of Nicker paint, and decided that the world deserved to look a little bit more beautiful than it actually is.
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Actionable Steps for Aspiring Background Artists
If you want to move beyond just being a fan and actually start painting the worlds of Studio Ghibli (or at least your own version of them), here is how you actually start.
First, get the right tools. You don't need the most expensive stuff, but you need the right stuff. Look for "Poster Color"—Nicker is the gold standard, but Turner is a solid alternative. Use a heavy watercolor paper (300gsm) so it doesn't warp when you start layering the wet paint.
Second, practice "color mixing from life." Go to a park, pick a single leaf, and try to mix that exact shade of green. Then, mix the shade of the shadow on that leaf. You’ll realize very quickly that "green" involves a lot of yellow, blue, and even a tiny bit of red to dull it down.
Finally, study the masters. There are several "Art of" books for Ghibli films—specifically the ones for Princess Mononoke and The Wind Rises—that show the background paintings without the characters on top. Scrutinize the brushwork. See where they left the pencil lines visible. See where they used a sponge instead of a brush to get the texture of a stone wall.
The world is messy, beautiful, and complicated. Ghibli backgrounds work because they embrace that messiness. They remind us that even a rainy bus stop or a cluttered kitchen can be a masterpiece if you look at it with enough love and a very fine-tipped brush.
Start by sketching your own backyard. Don't worry about making it look "epic." Just try to capture the way the light hits the fence at 4:00 PM. That’s where the magic starts. That's the Ghibli way.