Inside the studio of anime artists Linnea Kataja and Bellamy Luna Brooks

Linnea Kataja and Bellamy Luna Brooks are artists in the Japanese anime industry. Linnea is a keyframe supervisor; her work can be seen in TV anime as well as popular VTuber media for groups such as Hololive and VShojo.

Bellamy is a character designer, producer, and animation supervisor. She is known for dozens of contributions to TV and movies, and has designed many animations for online creators. (For more inspiration, read our list of the best anime and the best anime to draw.)

Here they talk us through the layout, equipment, and adornments of their shared workspace.

“When I’m not in-person at an anime studio helping out with their projects, this is where I do most of my work,” Linnea explains. “My partner Bellamy and I have our work desks together, mine is on the left and hers is on the right.

“We wanted to create a cute and comfy atmosphere to work on our projects together. Our main work is as keyframe supervisors, helping quality control the drawings of the animation in the Japanese anime pipeline to make sure that the characters are on-model, the perspective is correct, and so on.

“In order to do this, we’ll partially or fully redraw animation frames to make sure they match the look of the rest of the show. We also help to correct parts of the animation on request of the director and assistant director for the shows we’re working on. Bellamy also does character design,s and I do storyboarding for some other indie animation projects.

“The desks we are using are douga and sakuga desks, normally found in traditional anime studios in Japan. They have a few small shelves on the right side to hold animation paper, and a light table underneath to help with traditional animation. We rarely end up using the light tables since most of our work is done digitally using our iPad Pros and Clip Studio Paint.

“The shelves on the right of my desk have sakkan paper used in traditional animation to do keyframe drawing corrections and timesheets that time and notate the animation. In Japan, every cut of anime uses a timesheet to time by the frame when certain cels are used. Anime is timed on 24 frames per second, so you’d write the number cel on the slot you want keyframes and inbetweens to come in.

“The majority of my shelves hold various collectibles from artists I like, but we also have plenty of art and reference books here that are helpful for creating animation.

“I usually like to work on my own manga projects and illustrations once I come home from work. I’ve been enjoying creating manga by hand recently, so I have various traditional tools stocked to do just that. I also have a phone holder set up so I can stream my process on social media if I’m in the mood.”

Bellamy adds, “Our studio was born out of both passion and necessity. After our office was shut down, we could keep any furniture we wanted, so we decided to hold on to our traditional sakuga and douga desks. The real challenge was transporting them. Hiring a moving company was too expensive, and a taxi was too small, so in the end, we did what we had to do.

“We strapped them down in parts to a small box cart and physically pushed them across Tokyo on foot. It was exhausting, and we’ve never gotten so many weird looks, but I’ll never forget dragging those desks all across the city.”

Artist in residence: Linnea Kataja and Bellamy Luna Brooks

Linnea and Bellamy’s studio setup, clockwise from top left. “Linnea has a collection of Kuromi plushies and keeps some of her favourites at the desk to watch over her while she works.”

“These dynamic anime figures are some of Bellamy’s favourite characters, and also double as references for her artwork.”

“A banner from The Lord of The Rings: The War of the Rohirrim movie premiere. We both worked on it as senior animation supervisors.”

“Bellamy bought this plant from a store outside Studio Ghibli when she first moved to Japan. She thinks of it as a symbol of her growth in the industry.”

“After working on Dungeon Meshi as a keyframe animator, Bellamy bought these standees from the theatrical release of the first few episodes.”

“Bellamy was the character designer and keyframe supervisor for the VShojo Nova trailer. This is one of the character sheets.”

“Bellamy bought this large wooden iPad stand to increase the surface area for her hand to rest. It also mimics the feeling of a Wacom Cintiq.”

“These lanterns help keep the desk space lit up. Linnea wants to install more cool lighting into the desk.”

Animated artwork created for VShojo Nova, which was art directed by Linnea.

Bellamy was the character designer and keyframe supervisor for the VShojo Nova trailer. This is one of the character sheets.

An illustration by Bellamy for her self-published doujinshi Petals.

A close-up of Linnea’s workspace. Her second monitor has a wallpaper by the illustrator Yuyuco. She uses the second monitor to either respond to work DMs, open references for animation, or just to watch anime while she works.

Linnea creates most of her projects with a single iPad Pro. The days of needing a big tablet with a powerful computer are over.

Idol Royale is Linnea’s indie idol horror manga, and is available in both English and Japanese.

Bellamy gave Linnea this feather duster to brush away eraser shavings. The tools in the cup include inking supplies like nib pens and brush pens.

Linnea is a big fan of KAngel/Ame from the video game Needy Streamer Overload, and created a small shrine to the character.

The shelves of Linnea’s animation desk hold a lot of sakkan paper and timesheets, plus some random items like Polaroids for her camera and an extra fan for the hot Japanese summers.

This content originally appeared in ImagineFX magazine, the world's leading digital art and fantasy art magazine. ImagineFX is on sale in the UK, Europe, United States, Canada, Australia and more. Limited numbers of ImagineFX print editions are available for delivery from our online store (the shipping costs are included in all prices)