The background materials used at Disney were Winsor Newton watercolors and Whatman paper stretched on boards. No opaque paints or airbrush were permitted, not even to make a minor correction. He said, "A light pencil drawing was put onto the stretched paper by a tracer. Then we would look at the layouts given to us and interpret the shadows and other details. Then we would paint the backgrounds. It was a very long and painstaking process because we had to build up our colors wash after wash. When we got on Snow White we had to match six scenes in transparent watercolors in some sequences." One section of Snow White where he had to do six matching background paintings was a sequence in the interior of the dwarf's cottage. He had to paint the same wall and props from six different camera angles. When the action cuts from one point of view to the next, the background paintings had to look the same. And they did.

An especially memorable scene that he worked on was the moment when the Prince kisses Snow White. Walt was rushing the film to completion so Noble said he was designing and laying out the scene while he was painting it.

As a background artist Noble didn't have to suffer through the famous "sweatbox sessions," where Disney critiqued what was being worked on by his animators. However, he often attended these screenings to learn how his backgrounds worked with figures over them and to see what was going on.

Background artists at Disney had to go through a different form of torture, "the OK session." Noble said some of the sessions were experiences similar to nervous breakdowns. "A critical jury had to pass on all the finished backgrounds. You know how difficult it is to make corrections with watercolors?"

One of the great moments of his career at Disney was attending the premiere of Snow White. He said it was a miracle that he got screen credit on the film and was given two tickets by Walt to attend the premiere. "That was a real thrill and a highlight of my life. It was interesting to watch the audience. All the movie stars were there. I wasn't sitting downstairs with the hoi polloi, but I had a front row seat in the balcony. When the picture was over they all stood up and cheered. It was really exciting. Walt's folly had paid off! A million and a quarter dollars had been put into this cartoon. It was a real turning point in the animation business."

On a different note, another important moment for him was making the decision to go out on strike against Walt, "because I didn't believe that the wages being paid to beginners and some people who had been in the industry a long time were sufficient to live on," he said. Noble recalled how some people who went on strike lost their cars and homes. He also remembered soup kitchens for the strikers and the Disney goon squads who went looking for trouble. He said, "the strike was a very difficult period."

Eventually, the strikers won their long and difficult battle with the studio, but when he went back to work things had changed. None of the people who had remained loyal to the company would talk with him. His new office was a former broom closest and he had to stand on a chair to reach the window if he wanted to open it. The studio didn't give him any work to do so when he reported each day he would read while waiting to get an assignment. Two or three weeks later he was laid off for lack of work. A few weeks after that, Pearl Harbor was bombed and three days later he made the decision to join the Army Signal Corps.