Books: David Derrick's new picturebook-tigers and crocs!

A stack of worthy and notable titles has been growing on my desk, demanding attention and certainly deserving it but my gosh, it's been a busy year offline.

So the stack waits for proper reviews, but there's one that has a launch party coming up in the Los Angeles area on Saturday, October 26th (as of this writing four days away) at the Wildlife Learning Center, and I'd like to spread the word. It's a picture book written and illustrated by my friend, fellow story artist Dave Derrick:

 



Dave loves drawing, and he really loves to draw animals. This little story about a junior crocodile and tiger cub doing their best to out-boast each other is loaded with charm, done with gestural ink line and watercolor wash.


A detail of the cub. This guy suggests a self-portrait to me-in that way that certain drawings seem to look like their artists. Hard to explain, but I'm sure plenty will know what I mean.

 

 

 

 

 

The endpapers feature a panoply of the animals and birds of India, the story's setting.

 





 

 





Using this flyer-either printing it out or bringing it along on your phone-assures admission for Dave's launch event. Should be a fun time!

Michael Sporn

Michael Sporn's blog is like a Christmas gift every day with the beautiful things he posts. Here's part of today's entry-a collection of illustrations by Vernon Grant. Worth your while to take a look at that and everything else you'll find there.

Visit Ward Jenkins and learn about the enigmatic yet sunny Lou Peters

Ward Jenkins has singlehandedly amassed one of the best collections of fun 50s-60s illustration I've seen anywhere, and he blogs about it regularly and well. His most recent post is chock full of charming graphics by an illustrator named Lou Peters, Go see it!

Luigi, tu sei un artista incredibile

The image and idea for this post are freshly swiped from Cartoon Brew, but you can't over-promote something like this: Lou Romano has done a New Yorker cover.

A New Yorker cover. The great one. The pinnacle of illustration platforms. The one magazine that strictly provides a forum for illustrative art on its cover almost 100 years after its inception.
Coincidentally(and it really is), he has a starring role on a film he worked on in visual development coming out soon, too. This isn't suprising as Lou was likely acting before he was drawing--or most likely it was simultaneous.

His cover looks typically beautiful.

And I can think of at least one man who wouldn't be in any way, shape or form the teensiest bit suprised at this cover, and in fact was certain sure of it a long time ago. I can almost hear him predicting it. He probably did.
Congratulations, Lou.

(and many thanks to Dave Derrick for the instant Italian translation-in a pinch)

Travel, vintage, cartoons

I was always told jet lag a)wears off after the first day or so, and
b)is always worse when flying west to east.
Neither has been true for me...or maybe Paris has a special hangover effect. That must be it.

Anyway, here's a little something that popped out at me from today's(May 27)New York Times:
Because We're Not There Yet

Someone found a copy of a 1954 book on traveling with the family via car. It looks like fun(I love this kind of social anthropology), and has some neat illustrations to boot.
Here's two:



Unfortunately the illustrator of this little book isn't credited in the article.

I do try and keep the posts here specific to animation, but I think all the animators I know wouldn't mind seeing these or knowing this book exists--Ward Jenkins, I'm squinting at you--so...

ETA: More Fun: The intrepid Scott Santoro found this fun b/w clip of the author of "Traveling By Car", Carol Lane, demonstrating how to pack.

del Carmen, Casarosa, Tadahiro

Here's Ronnie del Carmen holding a book that's the print version of a three artist show he participated in last year, "Three Trees Make a Forest"-with his friend and colleague Enrico Casarosa and the exquisite Japanese artist Tadahiro Uesugi.

All three of these guys are seminal influences--on me, and doubtless on thousands of others, hundreds of whom are working in animation. Ronnie is a story artist, and his masterful use of space coupled with his very appealing characters made each new sequence he did something to pounce on--and if possible, to xerox. Enrico is another in this vein, very different but with lines that also come alive immediately. Tadahiro is just...something else again. Look them all up.

You can check the book out here. I swiped the gleeful photo from Ronnie's own page, incidentally. Is that Pixar's building behind him?

A deMille Christmas greeting

This is director Cecil B. deMille's Christmas card from 1957. I've had it for about 20 years--since retrieving it from deMille's desk, believe it or not. It's a longish story I won't bore you with here...but isn't this a terrific card? DeMille was making his "Ten Commandments" at the time, and the trades were predicting the expensive film would be a turkey---hence the sphinx drawn this way. It appears the artist is a man named Bruce Durrell, about whom I know absolutely nothing.

Who would have thought the intense Mr.deMille had such a great sense of humor--about himself? Of course, he did get the last laugh as "The Ten Commandments" was a hit.

P.D. Eastman

Like almost every kid--and especially every youngest child, we inheritors of hand me down toys and books--I grew up with the Beginner Books that Ted Geisel edited for Random House.
Ted also wrote many of the series under his most frequent pen name, Dr. Seuss. But although I loved Seuss, my absolute favorite author/illustrator was P.D. Eastman. "Are You My Mother?", "Go Dog Go!", "The Best Nest" and "Sam and the Firefly" among many others made a huge impression on me.

Like Bill Peet, Seuss, and a few others of their generation, Eastman had cut-to-the-heart appeal in his simple, friendly drawings--which were also often staged to great dramatic effect. I'm sure millions of children can remember the pentultimate image from "Are You My Mother?" with the baby bird, beak agape, perched on the edge of a huge digging crane's teeth.

Several years ago I was surprised (pre-Wikipedia) to find practically nothing about him on the internet. Via an old message on a librarian's website I stumbled upon an email for Tony Eastman, one of Phil Eastman's children and an animator in his own right, and we corresponded. It was from Tony that I learned that Phil had been a story artist at Disney's and UPA; well, I shouldn't have been surprised. It seems that virtually any illustrator whose sense of charm, staging and color were exceptional had worked in animation during it's golden age. Through Tony, I was connected with a woman who had a rare item: one of Eastman's original drawings, which she'd won at a charity auction over a decade ago. She'd kept it in her kids' room and was willing to let it go, and I'm happy to say it's now on my own wall:

Sorry for the poor image--it's framed, and I don't want to take it apart...but it gives a good look at one of Eastman's cover mock-ups; this one was an unused alternate for "The Best Nest"(it's so described and signed by Eastman in a notation at the bottom; it's also full sized in scale).


Interestingly, his first design was used--with some changes--for a later, popup version called "My Nest Is Best":

I'd be willing to bet almost all readers of this blog know Eastman, and that most of you liked his work as much as I did. It's a great example to me of the value of simplicity, and amazes me in how much he's able to suggest with very little in the way of detail. That's a story artist's dream.

tags technorati : phil eastman, beginner books, seuss, illustration, childrens books, animation, drawing

Disneyland: Frontierland

One more of the large-format Disneyland attraction posters:


I chose to post this as it's a lesser-seen image.
What a great design: bold, full of interest, action, even the distant promise of adventure in the faraway fort--if you can get to it!
This part of Disneyland--the "Rivers of America" and Tom Sawyer's Island--were like separate vacation destinations of their own. Once a kid was able to get a ride on a keel boat or a raft to the Island sans mom or dad, he was free. The terrors of Injun Joe's cave with it's horrible howling, the underground tunnel to the fort--even the gated forbidden zone of the "indian village"--all these things added up to the ultimate runaway fantasy of kiddom.

disneyland,
theme park, frontierland

Ward Kimball of Grizzly Flats

When Noel Barrett auctioned off the huge collection of toys and mainly trains Ward Kimball collected over his lifetime, I was wistful, a bit sad, and filled with memories of Ward showing me his collection. He had two rooms--one for european models, one for american. Each room had large tabletop setup in the middle, surrounded by these shelves. You can make out in this photo the labelmaker-listings he affixed underneath each one. I remember the european room had as its centerpiece a breathtakingly big crystal station.
I knew next to nothing about trains large or small, but of course Ward's enthusiasm and the fascination of these beautiful miniatures made it an unforgettable experience. I wish it all could have gone intact to some museum, but I understand the need, and I'm sure each one is a treasure to its new owner. I myself was the winning bidder on a bisque "Skippy" figurine from the 1920s(a then-popular comic strip character).

My childhood best friend, Lara Rossignol, took this picture around 1983 or so--a couple of years after I'd made my own trip to Grizzly Flats, Ward's home/train depot/toy museum/art gallery in Arcadia, CA. Lara was a photography major at Art Center, and needed a special subject for an assignment; she got some amazing shots of Ward from her visit with him.
This particular small print has obviously had water damage(last year's rains here in Los Angeles--ugh--a lot of materials were ruined in my home studio), but I think the pose is good enough that it should be shared.
By the way, if you like cool photography and especially portraiture(as I do), check out Lara's archives. She is a skilled and intrepid shooter; her more famous portraits include Nicole Kidman, Nick Cage, Liv Tyler, Tommy Lee Jones, June Carter Cash, Quentin Tarantino...to name only a few.
More blogs about animation.
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trains, Ward Kimball

VIP

We had a lot of old Virgil "VIP" Partch paperbacks lying around the house during my childhood. I thought the drawings were kind of...ugly, but I still liked looking at them(kids!).

So I was shocked to learn, years later during my Fred Moore research, that Partch had started his career at Disney's, of all places, palling around with Ward Kimball(no surprise there)and Fred in the golden age. It's interesting to think, given his utterly unique style, exactly how he fit in at Disney's, but his education at the Chouinard school suggests a great foundation in classical drawing.
He was a huge success a single-panel cartoonist at The New Yorker and elsewhere for the rest of his life, and while there were others with bizarre tastes in humor(Charles Addams, for one), he stood alone, really, and still does.
Here's a rough from VIP, a submission(his home address is penciled on the reverse)that I suppose upon acceptance would have then been cleaned up and inked. The things one finds at the San Diego Comic Con--this went for about 20 bucks. It's in poor shape, but still a fun slice of history. From the man himself!


cartoon, VIP, Disney

Happy New Year--and Merry Christmas, again--from Disney's in 1955

This is the front of the Disney Studio's 1955 Christmas card. It's quite a beautifully done thing; printed on a soft, high-quality paper, it's a large card that opens into a double-spread of the brand-spanking-new Disneyland, with a calendar running down the sides. I was unable to scan the entire thing, as it's just a bit longer than my scanner is. Great artwork--I don't know whose...anyone have any ideas?


May your fifty-years-on New Year be merry and bright!

Auld Lang Syne: Entree to the Disney Studio c.1981

I found this while tidying up recently:

The reverse is a map of the studio:

When I was issued this pass the studio was a completely different place than it is now. The animators were sitting at their huge desks in the Animation Building that "Snow White" had built for their predecessors, working on "The Black Cauldron". The charming, faux-1900 houses used in every Disney film of the 1960s still stood, as did the western street, and a beautiful, large town square had been recently refurbished and embellished at some cost for use in "Something Wicked This Way Comes". The commissary was dirt cheap--the prices seemed almost unchanged since Walt's time--and the entire lot had a lovely, low-key feeling.

More blogs about animation.

When humble gift tags were more fun

"simple and appealing" never gets old

Found several vintage greeting cards at the swap meet last Sunday--here's one.

Funny how after years of dismissal such purely enjoyable illustration is finally not only appreciated, but practicably a glut on the market, with hundreds of current artists working in these styles. Well, it's great, as it's all good stuff, and it's interesting to see how modern illustrators adapt vintage influences as their own.