The Chad Frye - Illustration GuyBack in 2009, I did a little series of watercolor paintings of characters I had become familiar with having worked on three seasons of the My Friends Tigger & Pooh television show.
Lumpy the heffalump, introduced in The Heffalump Movie, was a sweet character and was friends with Roo. The paintings weren’t done for anything official for Disney – just something on my own.
I’ve enjoyed drawing the Pooh characters ever since that show, and still get requests from kids from time to time.
Thanks to my friend Judy Soemer Gracie who I have known since we were kids, earlier this summer I was reacquainted with this old drawing of mine that I did when I was in high school for our church’s member cookbook. I don’t even remember drawing it, and yet it is familiar all at the same time.
A fun detail that I can tell is in the background is a portrait of large celebrity chef of the day Paul Prudhomme, having “him” sign the picture “Pig Prudhomme.”
I belong to the National Cartoonists Society, and specifically am a part of the Los Angeles Chapter called NCS LA. Affectionately, our chapter is known as The Order of Cornelius.
Cornelius is a bear who reportedly saved the life of California cartoonist George Herriman from hurtling over a cliff on a runaway toboggan. He later saved the lives of several other cartoonists, too, and thus earned his place as the patron saint of NCS LA after his passing. He’s now remembered as an angel bear who continues to look after the well-being of LA cartoonists.
Under the leadership of The New Yorker Magazine cartoonist Matt Diffee, NCS LA began giving annual awards for career achievement and for volunteerism to our members. We began giving the awards without actually having the physical awards to give. After a couple of years, I was tasked with designing The Cornelius Award (the one for volunteerism), while Diffee and Spencer Ramsey set about designing The Dingy (given for career achievement).
I looked to classic Art Deco medal designs of yesteryear to attempt to give The Corny an aged provenance of sorts. Cornelius was depicted in a more realistic manner, with his stylized angel wings and halo. Add a few lightning bolt accents, and we had our design!
The next step was getting the medals made, which proved to be challenging. One of our members, Drew Aquilina, found a Los Angeles based maker of custom medals, so I reached out to them only to discover that while they had an LA office, they were actually based in the Philippines which is where the sales representative was.
There was much back and forth via e-mail to make sure the specifics of the design were met with their production people, and then the order was placed. The medals turned out beautifully! They measure a large three inches across, and came with a plaid ribbon of our design long enough so this can hang around the recipient’s neck.
Of course, you have to take a look at The Dingy Award, too! Named after NCS LA founder Ding Daniels, it is given once a year to the member who has T.I.U.A.N. – Taken It Up A Notch – in their career. Diffee and Ramsey did a nice job on this one, too.
Earlier this summer after both medals were completed, NCS LA had a special medal ceremony to give the medals to the six people who had earned them over the past few years. The three recipients of The Dingy were children’s book illustrator Marla Frazee, cartoonist of the online comic Bacon Lonnie Millsap, and former MAD Magazine editor-in-chief Bill Morrison.
The Corny was given to Spencer Ramsey, Frank Hansen, and as a big surprise, yours truly. It felt kind of weird to be given the medal I designed, but it’s neat to have one.
Earlier this year, I created this piece for the Los Angeles Chapter of the National Cartoonists Society, otherwise known as The Order of Cornelius (OOC). It features the mascot of the OOC, Cornelius the Bear, who we hold in VERY high regard.
I’ll have more to say about the OOC in my next post when I show you a medallion I designed for them, but for now, if you are interested, I encourage you to visit the OOC’s website by CLICKING HERE!
Recently, I have been doing quite a few new drawings of Disney characters that used to be a part of my official professional past. Thought I’d share this one of Chip ‘n Dale with Donald Duck – all three of which I used to draw back in the mid 2000s when I was a part of the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse team for the Disney Channel.
For those of you curious about such things, these were drawing with Prismacolor colored pencils on textured Strathmore watercolor paper. I think I used a burnt umber, possibly French gray 50%, and one of their many shades of red. Might be fun to do this one again sometime, but as a watercolor painting.
– Joel Osteen (1963 – present)
In this case, perhaps obeying the signs is the best plan for self-preservation.
I had some doodle time last month and started out drawing this bear with his mouth wide open without a real plan as to what the scene would really be. It began as an exploration of big curvy shapes with the bear, but then his ravenous appetite needed to be justified. So, thinking back to a bear/rabbit piece I did last year (which you can see by CLICKING HERE), why not revisit that idea in a different way this time, too? So, voila. There you go. A big hulking hungry bear, a poor defenseless rabbit, and a sign to bring it all together in one humorous moment.
My doctor retired last month. After all the years of his great care, thought I’d do a little drawing for him to mark the occasion (name redacted for privacy sake). He deserves the time away, but man, I’m not looking forward to having to seek out a replacement for him. He was one of the good ones.
