Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- 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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- Of course, David Levine is one of the greatest of the modern caricaturists. His work appeared for years in the NY Review of Books, and actually became those cartoons became the figurehead for the paper.

Levine’s work has been collected in this big, beautiful book. I have Bill Peckmann (yet again) to thank for sending me some of these key pages with many great caricatures.

The juice of the book comes with some of the many and stunning paintings that are included alongside many of the B&W illustrations. Levine is a real artist and these color plates take him out of the world of illustration.

Here are some of the B&W illustrations. Tomorrow the color.

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Aubrey Beardsley

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Humphrey Bogart

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Elvis Presley

(By the way, Elvis’ head was cut off in the printing.)

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Paul Gauguin

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Georgia O’Keefe

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Pablo Picasso

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Jackson Pollack

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Gertrud Stein

Alice B. Toklas

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Orson Welles

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James McNeill Whistler

And then there are the paintings, which I’ll post tomorrow.

- Muggins Mouse is a book, illustrated by Keith Ward. The copy I’m posting was a Xeroxed copy Rowland Wilson pulled for Bill Peckman. They selected some to copy in color and others, to save money, they made B&W copies. Consequently, we have this mix version of the book. Unfortunately, it’s a rare enough book that we don’t have access to the original. Regardless, there’s plenty to enjoy in Mr. Ward’s great illustrations.

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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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- Years ago, Rowland B. Wilson sent Bill Peckmann a lot of xeroxes of this book, illustrated by Keith Ward. Muggins Mouse is not an easy book to locate, and it’s a beauty. So let’s just take a look at part 2 of the book (which is all of about 60 pages.)

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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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- Yesterday, I received this note from Bill Peckmann about some old copies Rowland B. Wilson had sent him.:

“I finally found Rowland’s copies of another Keith Ward book that he had sent me. It’s a 60 page book, half the copies are in color, half are B & W (not the best Xeroxes), why this is so, is unfortunately lost in the mists of time. The book is oversized, 9 1/2 by 12 1/2. . . . I haven’t looked at these pages in ages and the art is a lot better than I remember it.”

Such beautiful line work, fantastic cartooning. Very original.

So without further ado, I’m posting these great illustrations. This takes us up to the first chapter break. More pics to follow as soon as I get them.

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- Schoolhouse Rock became a reality when advertising exec, David McCall, realized his son, who was doing poorly in school, had memorized the lyrics to many a rock song. He produced a record with a couple of quickly written songs.

Tom Yohe illustrated some of the songs and presented it to McCall. They decided to put together an animated version, and the rest became history.

How it came about by Tom Yohe.

Here’s the storyboard and information, right out of the guide, on one particular episode of the show, Unpack Your Adjhectives.

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(Click any image to enlarge.)

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Here’s the storyboard from Phil Kimmelman & Associates.

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Here’s the YouTube version:

All this material came to me from the collection of Bill Peckmann, and I couldn’t be more thankful.

A week or so ago, I posted some of the illustrations from Bill Peckmann’s book, Gustaf Tenggren’s Story Book. This is a big, beautiful book with lots of chapters that take short pieces from some of the world’s most famous stories. Robin Hood, Heidi, Gulliver’s Travels and many others are all represented. Of course, to me the illustrations are everything.

Animation students don’t need to know who Gustaf Tenggren is. He was the designer brought in to Snow White and Pinocchio by Walt Disney. He went on to create the Poky Little Puppy and many of the most famous Little Golden Books.

Here, then, are some more of these illustrations from The Gustaf Tenggren Storybook.

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(Click any image to enlarge.)

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- I’d like to continue showing some of the Mary Blair work pictured in the Japanese book, The Colors of Mary Blair.

The work is sensational, of course, but they aren’t very well identified (in English). Hence I’ve chosen images almost at random without really knowing what projects they’re designed to illustrate. When I do have information, I’m passing it along. I suspect others of you may be able to identify it better that I. (I certainly don’t consider myself an authority on Mary Blair.) If so, please feel free to leave comments.

Mary Blair at Disney.

These first 5 images are from Penelope, a feature about a
time-travelling girl that was never produced.

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The following group come from various sources.
Some are from Penelope, although others look like they were
done on the South American trip, with the bold colors.

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The following group of six are labelled: “Upsidedownia.”

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Here are some watercolors Lee Blair did for Fantasia:

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And a couple for what looks like Pinocchio.

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