A Milt Kahl "Book Illustration"

 

Just recently a copy of Christopher Finch's 1973 book The Art of Walt Disney was offered at an auction in the UK. I love this book. Beautiful oversized reproductions of vintage animation artwork. 

What makes this edition special are the original drawings that came with it. Milt personalized the book with a sketch of himself and a fishing buddy. Here is what the auction house said about this item:

The most interesting aspect here is the fact that Milt refers to author Christopher Finch for not giving him a proper tribute, not "glorifying him" enough. A great artist revealing his bruised ego. 

Milt's photo and section in the book:

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyQymwYpCjxZLJZcbvXEuJiVIVX7awf-9OFe1IHi5_L06KHzDOc4e1pUpJWrEEaD22CQHS-3LT56ejOEkjfhyphenhyphen_xFY7KdU94_nflzrNBShpWzg7FohoxyC3ipislwARCU-oWIE2oCUdT_A/s1600/SBB-3.jpg

Infos about Donald Overfield:

Donald Overfield is a world-recognised authority on the history of flyfishing and its many varied participants down the ages. A well-known contributor and illustrator to the angling journals of this country, America and Scandinavia, author of Famous Flies and their Originators and the man chosen to update the Courtney Williams classic A Dictionary of Trout Flies, he is in the unique position to assess the greatness of G.E.M. Skues and his contribution to the history of flyfishing.
Overfield is a member of the Flyfishers' Club of London, Skues' haunt for fifty-six years, also international director of the Flyfishers Foundation of America and a member of the advisory board of the American Fly Tyers Round Table. He can usually be found, rod in hand, wandering the streams of his native East Yorkshire, when he tears himself away from his Warwickshire study and his continuing investigations into the craft of flyfishing and the artificial fly.

Early Gaston

I have never gotten into storyboarding very much during my time at Disney. I found it too difficult. Staging scenes in continuity doesn't come easy to someone like me who had been focusing on drawing and acting. So I have great respect for storyboard- as well as comic book artists. 

I was part of a small team that started work on the first version of Beauty & the Beast. This took place in London at the Purdum animation studio. Glen Keane was developing the Beast, while I was busy doing research for Gaston. At one point it was time to storyboard a few sequences, all hands on deck. I was very apprehensive at first, but with the help of a few others it became fun in the end. Hans Bacher's color treatment sure added a lot to my board drawings. Here are just a few of them.

Here is a link to a previous post on the early concepts for some of the characters from Beauty & the Beast:

https://andreasdeja.blogspot.com/2013/04/beauty-and-beast-outtakes.html

Tytla

Let's celebrate an Ukrainian-American artist who changed the face of animation forever. Volodymyr Peter "Bill" Tytla worked at several east coast animation studios before joining Disney in 1932. 

He became the first animator to deeply internalize his characters' emotions which resulted in a type of drawing and acting that had not been done before. (And many folks say had not been done since.)

Bill stayed at Disney for nine years during which he set the standard for character animation. His work leaves me with an enormous sense of awe. It will live forever.

Here are a few more of his character sketches I have collected over the years. 

My first post on Tytla from 2011: https://andreasdeja.blogspot.com/2011/07/bill-tytla.html

 

Fred Ludekens

Fred Ludekens (1900 - 1982) was an American illustrator and a member of the founding faculty for the "Famous Artists School" (Art courses through mail correspondence.)

He was also a mentor to a young Milt Kahl, before Milt joined Disney in 1934. Both artists shared a studio in San Francisco and worked for an advertisement agency, most likely Lord & Thomas. 

Ludekens was almost nine years older than Milt and naturally more experienced in the field of advertisement illustration. It is interesting to speculate what kind of influence his early art might have had on young Milt. I think there are a few similarities between these two artists. 

As you can see in these images, Ludeken's style has deep roots in realism. The compositions are highly organized, and there is a graphic flatness to them, on purpose. Busy line work is carefully contrasted with flat shapes. Confidence and formality are attributes that come to mind.

These are qualities you also find in Milt's drawings. But...since he ended up working in the field of animation, the added element of motion makes his drawings and animation supreme. 

 

Fred's Dwarfs

 

This pair of rough animation drawings showing Doc and Grumpy make for a great "flipping experience"

When you flip one drawing over the other, positive change is happening. That's an Eric Larson term. 

When Doc's head and body move upward, his hands change their positions slightly away from the body.

His belly moves downward, away from the head. The tip of his hat also changes direction.

The same goes for Grumpy. His spine goes from straight to curved, as his upper body moves forward a bit. The knees bend sightly to show the shift in weight.

You might want to print out these key drawings and flip them back and forth. For young animators this is the kind of stuff that can make a lightbulb go off!

 

For more on Fred Moore's dwarfs go here:

https://andreasdeja.blogspot.com/2016/02/dwarfs.html

Bob Peak

 

As a kid I was almost obsessed with the drawings Bob Peak created as part of the promotional material for the 1964 movie musical My Fair Lady. I was way too young to see the movie at that time, but these beautiful advertisement sketches were all over the newspapers and magazines. I loved the overall design of the poster, but also the sheer draughtsmanship. Those  wonderful loose yet accurate lines. I know that Peak used plenty of photographic reference, he probably even drew over some of those photos provided by the studio. But the end result is massively impressive and showcases his background in fashion drawing.

Peak would conceive many movie posters after My Fair Lady, for films like Camelot, Rollerball and Apocalypse Now, but this is my favorite. 

Peak passed away in 1992, age 65.

Fred Moore's Timothy

Blog reader Eli recently asked if I could post any Fred Moore drawings of Timothy Mouse from Dumbo. Here are copies of key drawings from the moment where Timothy re-appears from inside a wooden tub filled with champagne. This is only the first part of that scene.

I love that one fast, unpredictable move into the last pose. Here is a Youtube link to the the whole sequence:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTv9bTSEzgg