Cels Forum

Yes, the pencil drawing stage remains the same.  Basically,
the artists draw on the line arts on papers first, then
use the scanners to scan each sketch into digital format 
(ex: saving the files in TGA and BMP).  Then there are
usually some clean-up artists clean up the line arts since
the scanned lines don't usually look too sharp and well-
defined.  After that, there are ink & paint artists simply
pick the colors from the palette, click on each bounded
area and fill in the colors.  In the traditional hand-
painted process, it can take half to 1 hour easily to paint 
a regular looking frame (cel).  But with these ink and
paint softwares, it can only take a minute or two for 
one frame.  It simply saves a lot of time and labor, right
now, a lot of animation schools in Japan are started to
offer more of these computer animation classes than the 
hand-painting classes.  As you can see, this industry is
changing to the digital age.