Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- Back to Mary Blair’s great work. We move from the film work she did for Disney to the art work she did in designing It’s A Small World for the Pepsi pavilion at the 1964 NY World’s Fair. There’s so much artwork for this that I’m going to have to break it into two posts.

Here’s my selection for the first group:

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The artist at work.

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An architectural drawing of the site.

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- Jack Sidebotham passed away on Sunday. Bill Peckmann received the following message from George Newall, the co-creator of Schoolhouse Rock:

Sad news. Jack died last night. Evidently he and Dick Lord were having lunch when Jack complained that he thought he was having a heart attack. As it turned out, it was an aneurism. The good news is that he was in no pain and conversing with the doctor when suddenly he just wasn’t “there” anymore.

Yesterday, Jack’s niece, Kimberly Sidebotham Lennert, left this comment on my blog: “My uncle was a terrific cartoonist and had a great wit about him. I kept a box of all the little notes and drawings he sent to me. He could say a lot with a few lines and a few words. ”

In his memory, I’ve chosen to repeat his book on Cartooning done in the 70s. Jack worked at a number of advertising agencies and had a lot to do with the Piels Brothers campaign and Scholastic Rock. He also was the agency producer for the famous Jello Chinese Baby ad done by Ray Patin Prods.

For this “Art of” book, he brings back the Piels Brothers without their great voices, comedians Bob and Ray, to escort the reader through a few lessons in cartooning and a sample of a number of different jobs in the field.

I think the book was originally published by Grumbacher, along with several others on art and painting techniques, to compete with the cheap and successful books published Walter T. Foster. They were all sold in art stores for very little money, and if you hit on a Preston Blair book, you’d found gold.

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The book’s back cover

- The last of the full length animated features that Mary Blair helped to design was Peter Pan. Her artwork for this film is stunning, and fortunately it’s been published in many places.

Of course, there’s John Canemaker‘s excellent book, The Art and Flair of Mary Blair.
Then there’s the Little Golden Book of Peter Pan, .
These scans were all taken from the featured book, The Colors of Mary Blair

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- Alice. More pictures from the Japanese book, The Colors of Mary Blair. There are lots of pictures from this book that I’m not posting; I’d urge you all to buy it.

The three key feature films that were influenced by Mary Blair are Cinderella, Alice In Wonderland and Peter Pan. There’s a wealth of model drawings from each of these three available in various books. John Canemaker‘s brilliant work, The Art and Flair of Mary Blair, pulls all three together into one chapter and handles them beautifully.
Each of the films has a companion storybook that is illustrated with Mary Blair’s models. Peter Pan, Alice In Wonderland, Cinderella.

These Alice drawings are overexposed, but I picked a bunch I like.

(Click any image to enlarge.)

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This continues my series of color stills from some of the beautiful work in the exquisite Japanese book on Mary Blair, The Colors of Mary Blair. If you have the resources to buy this book, you should.

- The big three for Mary Blair, as a designer of Disney animation, were Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan. We’ll spend all of this post on Cinderella. Many of these illustrations made it into John Canemaker‘s invaluable book, The Art and Flair of Mary Blair. Others have made it into a Cinderella storybook with text by Cynthia Ryant. Still others appear only in this Japanese edition.

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A couple of Marc Davis models.

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- With this post, I’m concluding the material loaned to me by Bill Peckmann of Rowland Wilson‘s sterling artwork for Hercules. I started this post last week, and you can go back there to see other character designs.

These watercolors are less character designs than they are inspirational pieces. They are inspirational. How stunning this art. I would have loved seeing something like this on the screen rather than Gerald Scarfe‘s. But that’s just me.

As with some of the last posts, I’m showing the larger piece (and they are large) and then going in for some tighter blowups.

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Typed beneath this image:
HERC AND PHIL ADDRESS ZEUS ON MT. OLYMPUS
The realm of the gods is in the sky. The landscape is made of sky imagery –
the classic buildings, the trees, the hills are the colors of rainbows, thunderheads,
lightning, rain, hail and stars. Trees have tops made of clouds and trunks of rain
or lightning. Buildings evolve out of mist as do the gods themselves.
The gods can be large or human scale as needed.

In mythology, Zeus changed himself into a swan, a bull, a cloud,
and even a shower of gold.

Everything is as changeable and colorful as a sunset.

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Hercules and the Hydra.

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Typed below this image:

THE HOME OF THE GODS.

A skyscape. Trees, mountains and waterfalls appear and dissolve away.
We can see shapes in the clouds – temples and statues.
Lightning flashes and stars gleam in unexpected places.
The whole skyscape is slowly drifting.

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This ain’t heaven.

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This one looks almost as though it were painted
on black velvet – appropriately enough.

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- Here’s Hercules. The last two weeks I posted some wonderful watercolor sketches, preliminary art for The Hunchback of Notre Dame from the great cartoonist, Rowland B. Wilson. (see: Part 1, Part 2)

Here for the first of two parts are some drawings by Rowland for Hercules. This entry includes character sketches for characters that developed into something completely different, or didn’t end up in the film at all.

Once again, I must express my debt of gratitude to the generosity of Bill Peckmann for lending me the art to post here. Thank you, Bill.

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Megara

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Hades – version 1

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Hades – version 2

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Hades – version 3

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Death

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Pegasus

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Centaurs 1

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Titans 1

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Titans 3

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Titans 4

Next week, the last of these beautiful watercolor sketches.

- I’ve recently featured a number of illustration pieces by Wallace Tripp and have frequently expressed my feeling that he should have been desigining for animation. His style seems so ideal for the medium. Well, thank heavens, I’m apparently not the only one who thought so.

Bill Peckmann sends me a copy of a letter he received from Mr. Tripp which states that the accompanying artwork was designed for Richard Purdum’s British studio. The dragons are a delight.

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The following sketch and the character closeups are obviously
for something completely different:

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- Here are more of the stunning pre-production watercolors Rowland B. Wilson did for The Hunchback of Notre Dame while working at Disney. (Last week’s post can be found here.)

This group of images is labelled, “The Siege” and concerns itself with the climax of the film where the people storm Notre Dame Cathedral and Quasimodo pours oil on them. These pictures are so beautiful (and large) that I can’t help but split them up so you can see some of the closeup detail.

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Now this is a Hunchback I could love.

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These two character designs look like they were influenced
by Richard Williams’ “Cobbler & the Thief.” Since Rowland worked
with Dick in London, it’s possible.

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Errol Le Cain by way of Rowland B. Wilson. Beautiful.

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At first I wasn’t sure which end was up on this image.
It might be correctly viewed counter-clockwise.
However, the label in the lower left should be the lower left.

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Many thanks to Bill Peckmann for the generous loan of this material.

Next week Hercules.

- Bill Peckmann has sent me an incredible cache of photostats. These are watercolor paintings Rowland B. Wilson did while working for Disney. There are two groups of paintings: one for The Hunchback of Notre Dame, one for Hercules.

These were all inspirational sketches, and they’re all extremely long. Consequently, I’m posting them in batches. The first comes from Hunchback, and I’ll post the full sized image, then break each down into a couple of parts so that you can appreciate the incredible detail Rowland did in these things.

I hope you enjoy them.

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More of the Hunchback paintings to come next week.

Many many thanks to Bill Peckmann for sharing these glorious images.