January 1, 1904 – Head of Ink and Paint Department and Disney Legend Grace Bailey is Born
“Grace was quite a professional lady. She was class.” – Bob Broughton, Supervisor of Special Photographic Effects
On January 1, 1904, Grace Bailey Turner was born as Elizabeth Grace Randall, in Willoughby, Ohio. Bailey’s life was steeped in animation, as she began working for the Out of the Inkwell series for Max Fleischer after graduating from the Cleveland School of Art. In 1930, she moved from New York to Southern California, and applied for a job at the Disney Studios in 1932; she scored a position in the Ink and Paint department. The Ink and Paint department was highly important when it came to an animated film: inking could take about 12 months to learn properly, and one had to be very precise to preserve not only the animator’s original drawing, but also the emotion the animator wished to invoke. Bailey quickly rose through the ranks, from painting supervisor all the way up to the head of the Ink and Paint Department. After the success of Flowers and Trees, Disney’s first Technicolor animated short, Turner was tasked with the important duty of expanding the studio’s catalog of colors; a dramatized version of this process can be found in the Disney film The Reluctant Dragon during the tour of the Ink and Paint studio scene. After forty years at the Disney Studios, Bailey retired in 1972; she passed away on August 23, 1983. She was posthumously inducted as a Disney Legend in 2000.
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