They say it is Inktober beginning today – the month when many artists post an ink drawing each day. I don’t generally participate since I usually shake my fist at bandwagons, but I’ll likely have a few other ink drawings scattered around the next 30 days as I often do each month.
For an Inktober drawing to be valid, it has to be inked with genuine, real ink. None of this digital stuff. Donald here was inked primarily with my trusty ol’ Pentel brush pen, and a few other mechanical pens. Somehow, I managed to not require any white-out.
Would be so much easier to know what he’s mad about if one could understand his speech.
Back 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.
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.
Ducks and rodents living in harmony with one another – sort of.
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.
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.
Last year I helped out on an episode or two of Disney’s upcoming The Rocketeer show. If you follow my blog, you know I’m a fan of the original Rocketeer character (which you can see in a previous post if you CLICK HERE), so it was a real treat to be invited to work on this continued legacy.
Last week at San Diego’s Comic Con, Disney unveiled a trailer for the new show being made for kids, and it’s animated. Check it out!
Toy Story 4 opened in theaters last weekend. The Toy Story gang and I go way back together – back to the first movie in 1995. I was a young illustrator who was not that long out of university when I got to illustrate a couple of Toy Story books that came out in conjunction with the movie. They were coloring/activity books, but were a blast to work on.
I was given lots of blurry still images from the movie, and then had to reinterpret them into drawings that kids could color. I really had no idea what the movie was truly about, nor what the significance was of all the characters, but hey howdy hey, it turned into a juggernaut of a hit, and I became a fan along with everyone else.
Buzz, Woody & RC Racer as drawn for the book in the green cover below.
Despite the date you see by my signature, the drawing above was published in 1995. All three characters have a part in the new movie which I was fortunate to see back on June 12. Toy Story 4 is funny, heart warming, and made me wish I had some tissues towards the end.
This green cover book contained drawings that I both penciled and inked, including the previous drawing of Buzz & Woody on RC Racer.This peach colored cover was a book that someone else penciled, and I inked.
This last pic is from maybe 2007 and 100 lbs ago when I was working for Disney Television Animation, and treated my folks to a trip to Disneyworld in Florida where we got to hang with the gang from Toy Story 2. My only experience with that second film was getting to spend a day on the scoring stage with Randy Newman, but that’s another story for another time. Hard to believe this all started 24 years ago!
Did they grow? Or did we shrink to the size of toys? Hmmm.
When I was a kid, my dad let me read his old comics from the ’50s, and what he collected most was Uncle $crooge comics. Scrooge became my favorite Disney character, so I was influenced at an early age by the work of Carl Barks, creator of the ol’ duck.
This love for Disney comics even led to me writing a Donald Duck story that ended up getting published in Europe and here in the States! (The story was called The Kings of Chaos.)
This inked doodle of ol’ Scrooge McDuck came forth in my sketchbook recently. It’s only surprising that the Disney ducks haven’t shown up there way more often!
Tougher than the toughies, smarter than the smarties.
“Muuaaaaggrrrrrrr!” Which means, “May the 4th be with you.”
I always admired Chewbacca’s articulation.
And yes, today’s doodle is in honor of the passing of Peter Mayhew this week – the man behind the Chewbacca mask. I did meet him several times over the years at various fan conventions where I was surprised that he spoke English, and not just Wookiese.
