Okay, so I finally realized that, short of 
shelling out $100 for a drafter's portfolio, I 
wasn't going to find a binder big enough to hold 
my largest pan cels.  So instead, I decided to 
make my own.  An old tie-up artists' binder (free 
from a friend), a few drafting portfolio pages ($3 
a pop), a bit of creative binding, and voila!  One 
perfectly functional, extremely oversized cel 
binder.

Okay, so that means that it's finally time for me 
to unbag my biggest cels and slip them into the 
new pages... and in doing so, I made one hell of a 
discovery.

As most of you know, since I already publicly 
drooled all over it here in the forum, I recently 
acquired a Lord of Nightmares pan from Anime Game. 
 As with most cels that require special effects 
(in this case, an awful lot of golden light), 
every part of the cel which will appear to glow in 
the final shot is painted black in the actual cel.

Now, I've HEARD about special effects mask cels.  
They're sort of the opposite of the actual cel... 
the whole thing is painted black except for the 
part which is supposed to shine -- like, for 
example, Gourry's Sword of Light.  Then (from what 
little I understand of the process) they're filmed 
over a light source, and the resultant image is 
either digitally or photographically composited 
with the filmed cel to create a finished shot.

But oh wow, I never expected to actually SEE one.  
Yet lurking in the bag, behind the LoN and tucked 
in between two douga, was the full effects mask 
for the shot.  This is now about the coolest damn 
thing I own, cel-wise.  And I just have to share.