Duckheads

A little Donald doodle I cooked up.

Cartoon duck heads are incredibly fun to draw. The bills have these very satisfying curves to them. I always loved the way Donald's (and Daffy's, too) beak came to that rounded point and you could see where it folds back up around itself. There's a delightful logic to it.

I could draw duck bills all day. Here are some drunken unpleasant ducks I drew on Post-Its at work. They're hidden on my website.

The Pre-War Ladies of the Ink & Paint Club

An interesting article I read in Vanity Fair (weird magazine for me to be reading, I know):

Coloring the Kingdom

"Behind the breakthrough magic of Walt Disney’s first animated feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and his other 30s and 40s classics—Pinocchio, Fantasia, Bambi—toiled as many as 100 young women, the inkers and painters, working from dawn to dusk on thousands of cels that brought his dreams to life. The author recaptures their white-gloved esprit de corps, and a golden age of Disney that would be disrupted by strike, World War II, and, eventually, the Xerox machine."

It's a really cool profile of the ink & paint department of Walt Disney Studios in the early days of their feature animation in the 30s and 40s. One of the most interesting aspects is the accepted sexism that went on in those days, not unlike the popular and highly-rated cable TV series Mad Men. The department consisted entirely of young women, and it seems as though the male animators were almost encouraged to flirt with them. Look at Walt's invitation to the company Christmas party:

"All fillies should come in slacks or other very informal attire. Of course, if you want to be glamorous in a little satin or velvet guimpe for your favorite animator, that’s your privilege."

They worked like dogs, but the result was glorious. I know it's ridiculous to pine for the past when the modern computerized systems are so much faster, cheaper, cleaner, and more efficient, but doggone it, the result sure looked great.

Rens & Stimpies

Some doodles I did with my pen tablet.

Two of the most fun cartoon characters in the world to draw... mainly because the rules are so loose. To draw Bugs Bunny, there are a lot of little subtleties you have to get right or it just doesn't look like him. Ren & Stimpy, on the other hand, look different in every scene. That's because John Kricfalusi has a much more liberal idea of "on-model" than most animators.

This remains one of the best cartoon series ever made. Everything about it was fun: the voices, the crazy plots, the cartoony expressions. And it was the first cartoon I remember to give kids what they really want: booger and fart jokes!

I'm feeling good: here's a cartoon!

What the heck, they're free... here's another:

UPDATE: My mistake- I didn't realize the version of "Big Baby Scam" was the edited version. Here's the deleted scene of Ren & Stimpy in the bathtub with Grandpa:

Flat but Stylish

Here's a doodle I did today just for the heck of it:

I tried to keep it loose but still keep the basic feel of the characters. The lines are a little squiggly because I was using my pen tablet, which I am still getting the hang of, and trying to be conscious of the hierarchy of thick and thin lines. Came out ok, for being a quick sketch... I guess Barney's hand looks a little weird...

Like most people, I always liked the Flintstones, but I did have problems with it. The Hanna-Barbera limited animation style of all those Cartoon Express cartoons always looked cheap to me, even as a kid, and the flat drawing style bored me. The humor was also pretty thin... how many times did they use that same punchline when an animal is being used as a household appliance: "Eh, it's a living!" It also always bugged me that the characters would run with their arms hanging still at their sides.

More recently, though, I came to appreciate what HB was doing in those early days of made-for-TV cartoons. The drawings were more flat than their earlier theatrical shorts (like Tom & Jerry), but they were very graphical and stylish... an extension of the UPA style. The art was very carefully thought out by top designers like Ed Benedict and Carlo Vinci.

The backgrounds above are very stylish and well-designed as well. They retain the style of the character drawings but stand back because of the textures, and the limited color palette. I don't do a lot of painting (almost none actually) but I've been trying to incorporate this look into some of my drawings using Photoshop brushes. I may try out Corel Painter one of these days... can anyone recommend it?

This stylishness can sometimes be lost in the way these characters are depicted now... Sometimes you'll see them rendered with three dimensional shading, which makes absolutely NO sense with the way they were designed. Certainly not in this style, anyway:

They work so much better flat and grapical. The above just looks like a lousy Disney cartoon. In the '90s they even made a live-action movie. I guess it's interesting for about five minutes to see what they'd look like as real people, but when you stop and think about it the whole endeavor is kind of stupid, isn't it? I don't get why studios do this... if you want to make a Flintstones movie, why not a cartoon? It's the medium the whole concept was created around. Fred's outfit makes no sense on a real human body.

Everything has its place. These HB cartoons can be sort of boring to watch but there is genuine skill in the way they were executed that I am just now beginning to pick up on.

Here's a couple funny clips, including Fred and Barney hawking cigarettes in the 60's:

Lonesome Ghosts

Hey gang- here's another great cartoon!

This is one of the many Disney cartoons I saw as a kid, over and over and over again on VHS, taped off TV.

As an adult, a part of me finds the Warner Brothers cartoons more appropriate to my tastes- the humor is sharper, the characters better. The prevailing opinion is that while Warner Brothers had better gags and more appealing characters, Disney excelled in smooth, technically brilliant animation. So with a Disney cartoon, you're less likely to actually laugh out loud.

This sounds about right to me... think about Bugs Bunny's wit vs. Mickey Mouse's personality, or lack thereof. On the other hand, Donald Duck, while somewhat narrowly defined, is one of the funniest cartoon characters to watch. More about him in a future post. For now, let's get down to my insane-obsessive analysis.

First of all, look at these bums, lying around, waiting for the phone to ring. This cartoon came out in 1937 – 47 years before Danny Aykroyd & company captured our imaginations with Ghostbusters. Now that's forward-thinking!

I also love the idea of trying to catch ghosts with shotguns and nets. At around the five minute mark, Donald even punches a ghost in the face. Who would think of doing this?

The ghosts' voices are funny to me too- the creators just added a weird echo to them to make them sound "otherworldly" or something, but it's a 1930's effect so it sounds like they're in a bathroom stall or something. I love it- it's one of those details that brings me back to watching it as a kid.

This above is the kind of thing you see more of in the Disney shorts. Both Disney and WB showed you crazy things you couldn't see in real life, but while a Bugs Bunny cartoon might be filled with quotable dialogue, shorts like this were more based around complex visual gags. Mickey bouncing off the door (twice), then having to catch his balance before pulling the door to the floor. It's the kind of thing you can only see in cartoons and here is rendered beautifully- the timing, the subtle details that go by before you even realize they're happening.

Mickey catching his balance after bouncing off the wall is one of those moments I love. It happens so fast you barely notice it, but goes so far in terms of bringing life to the character.

Here's another one of those visual gags- this is a fairly long, slapsticky scene of Goofy getting caught up in this armoire-type thing. He's not saying anything particularly funny, but the animation is executed perfectly so it's great to watch.

I haven't seen this one in years, I can't imagine why these old cartoons are never on TV anymore. Kids would still love them. Youtube is great!

Angry Old Men

Some sketches of middle-aged men that popped up in my notebooks and post-its at work.

I don't know what happened to this guy, but he seems pretty annoyed about it. I guess this is the punchline to a comic strip or something.

This fellow reminds me of a teacher I had in high school... sort of an irascible, effeminate middle-aged man whose shirts were always a bit too tight.

This guy probably has a hard time finding a shirt that isn't too tight, too.

Ballad of Billy The Kid

Who doesn't love this guy?

I've been listening to a bunch of Billy Joel lately. He's one of those guys I listened to constantly in the 80's because a) he was still churning out the big hits, and b) my mom listened to him. Back then he was pretty cool, boppin' around in his videos in sunglasses like he was a good lookin' guy or something. And he could back up his bravado because he was married to Christie Brinkley.

He's also one of the guys whom I have witnessed growing old, and unlike many of his contemporaries he has decided to age the way a normal person would. There's a definite dignity to that which I very much respect (just look at Elton John's wigs to illustrate my point- that being said, I love Elton too).

Here he is again with those features more exaggerated:

It's time for me to start improving my caricature skills, and to do that effectively I think I need to practice realistic portraits first so I get all the features down before I start exaggerating them. This one is a lot rougher than the straight portrait, but I think the ideas are there... busted-looking nose, sunken-looking eyes etc. I'll post an improved version when ready, maybe a younger-looking Billy this time.

These songs are second-to-none, by the way. It's too bad he's essentially retired form songwriting because he really does craft a solid song... verses and choruses all loaded with hooks, satisfying rhyme schemes, and they always tell a story. He doesn't cheat you either- listen to his songs, they always seem to have four or five verses, a bridge will repeat with an entirely different set of lyrics, and when you think the song is ending, a whole new verse starts up that adds a new wrinkle to the situation.