It’s not uncommon in the close-knit animation industry to hear people refer to their co-workers as family. But in the case of Background Painter Tristin Roesch Cole, the reference is literal. The colleague she’s known the longest is her dad, Background Painter and Layout Artist Ron Roesch.
As a child, Tristin would sometimes tag along to work with Ron at Hanna-Barbera. But her memories of him as an artist go back even further than that. “I was pretty young when he was doing his fine art,” she says. “I remember him painting in the garage all the time.”
Primarily self-taught, Ron began his career showing watercolors in galleries. He was successful, but eventually he had a family of five to feed. “I just ran out of gas as we got toward the eighties,” he says. That’s when he was given a referral to meet Joe Barbera. “I got interviews with [Iwao] Takamoto and the different heads of departments,” he says. He showed them his portfolio, and a week later he was working at the studio.
Ron’s first jobs in animation took many forms. He’d just started at Hanna-Barbera when he met a fellow night class student who worked for a pharmaceutical company. This led to freelancing on a series of award-winning animated medical and sports safety films. As well, the aerospace industry was reaching out to artists at this time, and Ron helped design interiors for NASA’s Spacehab module, a pressurized laboratory first used on the space shuttle Endeavor. This overlapped with his work designing spacecraft interiors on Hanna-Barbera’s Saturday morning cartoon block Space Stars.
Given Ron’s artistic influence, it seems natural that Tristin would have headed straight for the animation industry. But when it came time for her to go to college, she pursued another interest—marine biology. At one point, Ron says: “I saw her different drawings of whales and fish, and there was one little Garibaldi that she drew.” He noted how lifelike it was, and he told Tristin that while he couldn’t help her get a job in marine biology, he could help her get one in animation. She decided to change course and hopefully circle back to marine biology later in life.
She switched majors and finished up with a degree in art from Orange Coast College. Then for more specialized instruction, she took classes at The Animation Guild’s American Animation Institute with teachers from Walt Disney Feature Animation. “I was learning how to paint Lion King grass and Hunchback stonework,” she says. From there, her first job was as a producer’s assistant on Animaniacs and Pinky and the Brain. But she continued painting, and the people she worked with “saw my passion for art,” she says. She moved on to character and prop cleanup on Road Rovers, the first show where she and her dad would cross career paths.
Ron calls the animation world he started out in “steam powered, just pencils and brushes.” When Tristin entered the industry in 1995, traditional painting was still common, but within a few years, the series Static Shock was looking for someone to paint comic book-style backgrounds digitally. By now Tristin was a Background Painter. She had also been teaching herself Photoshop, making her an ideal candidate for the job.
For the most part, Tristin would continue to work with computers, but Ron stuck with tradition. “I’m a hard head,” he says. Tristin adds: “He has this amazing ability to be able to turn anything around and draw it perfectly from his imagination… Oftentimes they would have him draw [something], and then the computer modelers would model it after his drawing.” This skill goes back to Ron’s high school days, which included four years of mechanical drawing and building models. “It was easy for me,” he says. “If I see one side of something, I can tell you what it looks like on all sides. Inside, outside, back.”
Ron’s art style is monochromatic, desaturated, and what he describes as “diminishing Americana.” Tristin, on the other hand, calls herself “more of a colorist.” Despite these differences, she says she learned a lot from her dad. “He has a way of painting with the pencil. Some of his layouts, they’re shaded, but the way the light hits everything—it’s got an emotion to it. That’s what I try to convey with my paintings. I want you to feel.”
Recent years have seen big changes for both of them. Ron retired from a TV and film career that ranged from The Jetsons and Scooby-Doo to The Iron Giant, Thru the Moebius Strip, and Planes. As for Tristin, with a downturn in the industry, she found time between shows to pursue other interests, including her old passion. With marine biologist friends, she visited Baja California and the Cook Islands to study gray and Humpback whales. She says she never would have taken the first trip if not for her dad: “He encouraged me to follow my dream.”
This is an extension of the advice Ron has given her throughout her career: find the joy in the job. Joy, in their case, was fed by working together in the same industry. Tristin calls her dad her best friend, and when Ron looks back on the decades he’s shared with his daughter in animation, he says: “Those were my blessings. Irreplaceable.”
Learn more about Tristin at her website.
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