Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- I’ve posted the first two installments of Rico LeBrun’s guide to drawing the deer. This will complete the booklet that was prepared exclusively for the Disney artists working on Bambi where LeBrun taught classes in animal anatomy.

Sky David was kind enough to have copied these for me and I certainly couldn’t resist sharing this book with you.

Here’s part I.
Here’s part II.
Rico LeBrun in class teaching the anatomy of a horse.
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Thanks again to Sky David for the access to this great document.

- In John Canemaker‘s collection is a children’s book I lust after. It’s a 1935 publication of the Silly Symphony. The illustrations are out of this world. John’s loaned it to me to post the images. Every other page is filled with the type of the story, and the remaining pages are illustrations – most in B&W with tone. The book was published by Whitman Publishing.

(Click any image to enlarge.)

These two full pages drawings grace the covers’ interiors – front and back.

- Last week I posted the first half of the book How To Make Faces by Frank Webb. This was a book on “how to draw faces” published in 1940.

I initially posted part of this book in August 2006. Its popularity inspired me to repost it with the remainder of the book added.

The first half takes the alphabet and builds up from there. This part takes simple shapes and does much the same.

When I initially posted the book I received an interesting letter worth posting again:

Hi,
Frank Webb was my great uncle, and I am very pleased to have found someone who still knows of him. I have a bunch of his stuff, and know a bit about his history, including him publicly proclaiming Walt Disney a crook! One of Franks drawings ended up in a sale to Disney, and renamed (from “Dippy Dog”) to Goofy. Thank you for including him here.

Darren Reese

Here’s the second half of the book.

(Click any image to enlarge.)_______

As I mentioned, every other page is a “Practice Page” where you’re supposed to try to draw the characters. For the first half of the book, these practice pages are blank (except for the type “Practice Page”), however in this second half some of the pages have an exercise at the bottom. These pages look like the one to the bottom left.
I’ve taken all of the remaining exercises and have ganged them up onto the image to the lower right.

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- Back in August 2006, I posted one of my most popular posts. Since then, (even as late as this past weekend) there have been many comments by people remembering and speaking positively about this featured book.

Since I’d only posted half a dozen pages, I thought I’d yield to the many requests to see more. Consequently, I’ll post the entire book in two parts. (Mind you every other page is a blank “Practice Page.” I didn’t scan any of those. If you want to practice, you’ll have to get your own paper.)

These pages are taken from a book I have, published in 1940, called How To Make Faces. The author, Frank Webb, was a comic strip cartoonist who drew the cartoon panel ‘Kartoon Kollege’ from 1940-41. When this strip ended, he created the comic strip ‘Raising Kane’, which ran until 1944.

___(Click on any image to enlarge)_______Other than that, I haven’t been able to learn
____________________-_______________much about him. I find it interesting that he signed each page of his book almost as if he expected it to run in a newspaper on a daily, one-page-at-a-time basis.

His approach was to use the alphabet and build up from there. When he runs out of the alphabet, he just turns to shapes then just asks you to copy his picture or finish the page.

This first part includes all the drawings made from the Alphabet.

– John Canemaker has loaned me a couple of books to be scanned for posting. These are all storybooks for young children, and they’re all adaptations of Silly Symphonies.

These books are some of the first bits of merchandising to piggy back some of the more popular short films. Aside from the “Mickey” craze, there was a demand for Silly Symphony merchandise. The biggest book featured the original Three Little Pigs, which I posted back in Feb. 2007.

There’s no doubt that The Country Cousin was one of their more popular shorts. It’s been called one of the great advances in character animation – specifically the drinking scene animated by Art Babbitt. This all led up to the film’s Oscar win.
_______(Click any image to enlarge.)
___________________________________________I’m amazed that this book has such
thick paper with very crisp colors. It’s held up well all these years later. The book is slightly larger than posted; I cut some of the extra white space around the images.

These are the two inner cover pages. (The pages are much larger,
but I just took the drawings.)
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The title page
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- I’ve done a number of postings of Errol Le Cain‘s marvelous illustrations and hope to continue to do more. Of course, I’ve had a distinct interest in his artwork since I first saw him in the original BBC documentary on Richard Williams’ studio at One Soho Square. The show highlighted the short film, The Sailor and the Devil, which Williams used to train Le Cain in the art of animation. The first book I saw by Le Cain, Thron Rose, hooked me, and I became a collector.

I have a peculiar book, I’d like ot share with you now. Crisis at Crabtree tells the story of the village of Crabtree, due to be demolished. All of the houses detail their histories before they are to go. Only Norman, the medieval farmhouse is slated to be protected.

This book was written by Sally Miles and illustrated by Le Cain. The illustrations, as you’ll see here, are Easter egg gems.

Crisis at Crabtree was published in association with the National Trust.
Here are the illustrations:

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Front Cover & Back Cover

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Dedication page

- Let’s imagine.

Mary Blair is the most brilliant of all the color stylists to have worked at the Disney studio during its heyday. Among the photographed storyboards loaned me by John Canemaker was this board of Mary Blair images. The only problem is that it’s B&W. So, we have to imagine the array of greens and blues and yellows the designer would have used for this very colorful sequence.

This is the board in it’s entirety. Now, to split it up so you can look at the images a bit more closely.

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_____To enlarge any of the images, click on them.

Here’s an image from Canemaker’s book, The Art and Flair of Mary Blair. I just wanted to remind you of how these other images probably look in color.

- Last week I posted part of a book of notes Dick Williams took while attending a lecture series Art Babbitt gave in Dick’s studio in 1973. That was obviously a forerunner of Dick’s book, The Animator’s Survival Kit which led to his newer set of DVD’s – the Masterclass Series.

Dick’s site is interesting in that it gives a full preview of these dvd’s, so I heartily suggest you take a look. If nothing else, Dick inspires while informing.

In that last post, I talked about a second series of notes Dick had. These were more formal and swiped a lot of information from everywhere and everyone – Disney lecture notes, Preston Blair – and also notes from some of the other masters that Dick had visiting his studio.

So here are a few pages from that oversized book. No pictures – all writing. Old xeroxes.

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Boy does this guy know the stuff of great animation.

- Yesterday, I started posting this Disney children’s book, The Runaway Lamb. It was adapted from the Live Action feature (with a short animated sequence), So Dear To My Heart.

It’s not quite as strong a film as was Song of the South, but it still retains a sweetness that makes it worth sitting through. The animation wasan’t quite an equal to the earlier film with its great Joel Chandler Harris characters, but it holds up with the animation of many of the compilation features of the time.

One of the more interesting aspects of the film is the credit for the animated sequence, story treatment is credited to “William Peed” which was, of course, Bill Peet’s actual name.

Here’s the remainder of the book, loaned to us by John Canemaker. My thanks to John.

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(The book’s back cover.)

- So Dear To My Heart was Disney’s second try at a live action feature, following Song of the South. Like the earlier film, they employed the same two children, Bobby Driscoll and Luana Patten, and told a story around them and their pet lamb. There was a sweet animated sequence which was directed by Ham Luske. Mary Blair, John Hench and Dicke Kelsey designed it. Animation Department
Les Clark, Milt Kahl, Hal King, Eric Larson, John Lounsbery, Don Lusk, and Marvin Woodward were credited as animators.

Here’s a book that built on the film’s characters. It’s done in a style somewhat similar to the animated sequence in the film. The book is illustrated by Julius Svendsen, who became an animator at the studio, working in films from Melody (1953) to Robin Hood (1973). He also did a nunber of comic book illustration for Disney in the late 50′s and 60′s, working with Floyd Gottfredson.

The drawings in this book are excellent; strong poses with fine watercolored backgrounds. It’s similar to but totally different from the Little Golden Books that were being done at the same time.

The book comes from John Canemaker‘s collection, so I want to thank him for allowing me to post the pictures. A lot of scanning’s involved, so I have to break it into two posts to give you the full book.

(Click any image to enlarge.)____________

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____________Look for the conclusion tomorrow.