Stuff I Drew in Art School

Here is another post with old student samples, ranging back from 1976 to 1979.
That's my landlord's son Rene in the drawing. He would stop by my rented room once in a while with friends. They sometimes watched cartoons while I sketched them.

A couple of life drawings. My art teacher encouraged us not to get used to our favorite tool. So I tried marker, pencil, brush and ink and even finger paint. It's always interesting to see what happens when you experiment.

A rough self portrait. A little too rough.

Studying anatomy and rhythm in old masters' paintings.

And then having the audacity to apply that to a cartoon girl.

Occasionally me and my student friends would get together and pose for each other. The models at school seldom got into poses that showed any motion.

More of Rene and his friends.

These are drawn from Super-8 film footage I took of dogs in action. Trying to get a feeling for anatomy in motion.

Playing around with poses for cartoon animals, anthropomorphic or otherwise.

An exercise in shape and line. After a few rough doodles I choose one composition to create flat graphics. I had just visited CalArts and assignments like these were exhibited on the school's classroom walls. So I thought I'd give it a try.

Studying the great Uderzo, of Asterix fame and other iconic comic strips. What an artist! Meeting him years later was un indescribable thrill.

Dabbling in semi abstract forms. Look at my signature on the bottom right, LOL. Any similarity to an American Animation producer is coincidental.

Looking back, I had a great time as an art student. There were two things that turned out to be essential to my future career:
Giving myself assignments that related to the art of animation, and having Hans Bacher as my "after hours mentor".
Here is more of my student work from a previous post:
http://andreasdeja.blogspot.com/2012/01/post-100-old-portfolio-stuff.html

The Huntsman

Albert Hurter drew these charming sketches showing the Hunter after he couldn't bring himself to kill Snow White. He begs her to run far away and hide.
That makes him a good guy, who disobeys the Evil Queen's orders. During the sequence preceding this moment though he is portrayed as a killer who will go through with murdering the princess.
With his scary expression and body movements everyone who sees the film for the first time believes he is going to do it.
To achieve this kind of horrific depiction some live action reference was used to help with the realism required for this type of character.

An actual photostat with the corresponding animation drawing, which is likely a clean up study, since it is drawn in red and not in black pencil.

It's astonishing to me how far Disney went with the portrayal of villains from the early features.

The Queen, the Witch, even the Spirit of the Magic Mirror must have scared the popcorn out of kids way back. But Disney insisted on strong contrast between good versus evil, and that needed to be clear in the characters' design as well as their acting.

Even the 1938 comic strip based on the film maintained the frightening anxiety of the moment.

Sherlock Holmes & Dr. Watson

Way back my art school (Folkwang Schule, Essen, Germany) didn't offer any animation classes. As a student I decided to give myself various assignments in order to explore my potential as a future animation artist. I would create model sheets a la Disney, animate walk cycles and try to explore character concepts for an imaginary movie project.
Early in 1980 (still at art school) I wondered what the cast of Sherlock Holmes might look like, if depicted as animal characters, similar to Disney's Robin Hood. 
It was a way for me to practice the Disney style in rough form (I had just found out that Disney designers and animators worked pretty loosely). So I practiced staging, expressions and a little bit of color exploration with Magic Markers. I never showed these sketches to my art teachers at school, knowing how much they disliked the Disney approach to animation. The one person I did show them to was my friend Hans Bacher, who had graduated from the same art school and was at that time in business as a designer, storyboard artist and animator for several German agencies and TV stations.
Without Hans' constructive criticism and input I would have been completely lost.

So here I figured Sherlock Holmes as some kind of bloodhound, Dr. Watson as a duck, the inspector as a fox, and a policeman as a lion.
When I look as these sketches now after so many years, I still sense my unstoppable passion for Walt Disney's Animation, so many years ago. (A passion that is even stronger today).

Disney Book Illustrations

As a kid I was always searching for new Disney books which told stories using original stills from the movie. Looking at those film stills it felt like the movie stopped, and I had the chance to study the images thoroughly. Background paintings, inked or xeroxed cels and the overall color mood.
Then I discovered the Disney Golden Books. The pages in them showed special illustrations, in which the staging was often re-arranged to tell the story in a comprehensive way. Veteran studio background artists like Al Dempster, Gustaf Tenggren and even Mary Blair created beautiful paintings in Gauche or Watercolor.
Disney Editions recently published The Art of Disney Golden Books by Charles Solomon. It has great insight into the history of this popular book series. The art work is brilliantly reproduced, and each illustrator is profiled. I highly recommend this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Disney-Golden-Books-Editions-Deluxe/dp/142316380X/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1422510234&sr=1-2&keywords=disney+golden+books

Wilhelm Kuhnert

German animal artist Wilhelm Kuhnert (1865 - 1926) is somebody who's work seems to get better the more you study him. At first glance his drawings and paintings communicate the kind of bland realism that is so typical for a number of modern wildlife artists. But then dramatic, non formulaic poses of big cats and other wildlife emerge, showcasing the artist's unique observation. Unlike some other artists of his time, who studied animals at zoos, Kuhnert actually travelled to Africa, India and other places to see lions, tigers and elephants up close.
For obvious reasons I am very interested in his depiction of big cats. Wether resting, stalking or hunting, Kuhnert always finds the most intriguing poses to portray the animal's emotional state. By contrast his environments often don't come up to the quality of his painted animals.
See what you think!