Bear Heads.....

Here's some random doodles of a bear character I had rolling around in my head. Lately, when I draw I prefer to use Polychromos because it's an erasable pencil and it has a nice flow. Years back when I was working on Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures For Bakshi & John K. and Beany & Cecil for John Kricfalusi, I was used to drawing in Col-erase, however John quickly got me out of that and told me to draw with Prismacolors for my character layouts. Prismacolor Pencils have a nice flow and you can get a drawing down pretty loose and quick, but the main problem is that they're nearly impossible to erase with! In order to correct the drawing, you had to use white out. I got used to drawing with those pencils and still like to sketch with them as seen here with the bear heads. My approach with Prismacolor is simple; I'll do a very light underdrawing first, then go over it with bolder strokes.
Most of the time though, I'm using Polychromos or Ebony pencils for my sketching, but will still switch back to Prismacolor for fun or col-erase for animation work.

The Spooktacular New Adventures Of Casper

When I moved back to NY in early 1995, I had secured freelance work on a show with a new production outfit in Manhattan. It all sounded good in the beginning. Everyone was impressed with my work and credentials and couldn't wait for me to get going on the first storyboards. Then everything came crashing down. Nothing went right. Changes were ordered on almost every single panel; from just about everyone in the studio including assistants. I have no problem with revisions, but some of the changes were absolutely moronic. After a valiant attempt to please everyone, there was a second round of revisions on top of the revisions!
That storyboard which should have taken 3-4 weeks to complete was now taking 8+weeks to complete.
I stopped work on the show and told the production manager I was done. Although I was happy to be off that show, the sudden realization hit me; I had no work and virtually no prospects of future work. I called around to a bunch of studios and there was no work to be had. It was a scary moment. I began to doubt my decision to move back to NY, but miraculously, I soon found myself being offered series work from a good number of studios. First came a series offer from Hanna/Barbera, then another from Universal Cartoon studios and then there were other various freelance jobs. I grabbed all of them; I didn't turn anything down! The longest lasting of these jobs was offered by Alfred Gimeno who was Producer and Director of the new Casper show at Universal. I ended up storyboarding a whole bunch of episodes from 1995 through 1999. When I was young, one of my favorite cartoons was Casper The Friendly Ghost, so I thought it was a real kick to work on the new show!
To say that working on Casper was a breeze would be an understatement. It was a fun show to work on, with lots of opportunities to do a whole lot of funny business. The ghostly trio, with their obnoxious personalities were my favorites; lots of great character business! The problems that I had with the previous studio were practically non-existent on this show. All I remember from the experience was laughing a whole lot at some of the drawings I created. Of course there were changes; a few here and there, but basically what I boarded remained pretty much the same in the finished version on the small screen. The first few boards were really rough in nature and I was asked to draw cleaner. I can rattle off drawings pretty quickly and by slowing down a little bit I can actually get a good amount of info into the drawing. The boards presented here are actually still considered rough storyboards, drawn in Ebony Pencil that look clean. What I did was rough out each panel with a quick gesture of the action, then rubbed that down with a gum eraser and drew over it with a sharpened ebony pencil. That's probably why you don't see a whole lot of construction lines in the board pages posted here from 'Pen and Tell Her' (click on the images then click again to enlarge the pages). This enabled me to save time in clean ups later. One board that I did in this way went through without a single change! Alfred would later leave the show and a new director, Marija Maletic Dail took over. Pretty much it was business as usual although Marija had a few suggestions here and there with her take on the boarding.
Looking back at these drawings, it's definitely not my best work (hard to believe it's been 15 years since I drew them) but it's still better than the drawings done for the finished cartoon!There were lots of shortcuts taken (as the boards had to be done fairly fast) and some of the drawing seems a bit off. However, I think it captured the attitudes pretty well and it's cool to look at. We had a whole bunch of people working on this show from the Animaniacs and Tiny Toons crew including writers, voice people and animation artists. Overall, it was a pretty neat experience but looking at the end product left me a little non plussed. The cartoony expressions and attitudes were basically discarded by the overseas animation studio (obviously not knowing what to do with them!).
As I recall, there was a whole lot of frustration with the production being on a such tight budget.
The finished animation was extremely uneven at times, sometimes downright horrible, but that's what you get sometimes with overseas animation houses!

Hurricane Blues

Hi Everyone!

I started posting again to the blog and then the darnest thing happened.....Hurricane Irene!
And I was in the storms direct path on Long Island, New York! Although it was downgraded to a tropical storm, it took down plenty of trees and utility poles.
Although I was unaffected by the actual storm, the night before the storm blew in, a transformer near me went KABOOM and all the power went out in my area....FOR FOUR DAYS!
We just got our power back Wednesday night. YIKES!
I'll have some new drawings up for your view tomorrow night!
Thanks for your patience and tell your friends...
Brian

Heavies

Well here's a couple of sketches of some heavy set characters. These drawings were done fairly fast and loose with a polychromos blue pencil. You might see some of my influences in the drawings although I didn't intentionally try to ape a particular style. A lot of times when developing a character, I may focus on body shape and body attitude over the basic head features, but in this case, I focused more on the facial expressions in both sets.

Another sketch...

Some of you have been asking me to add more drawings to the blog. So here's a new one of a short angry guy. Actually, it's not that new...it's been sitting by my scanner for weeks.
I'm finally getting around to scanning this stuff and putting it up on the blog.
Look for more over the next couple of days.
This drawing is inspired by the funny little guy from Pink Panther cartoons and Phil from Hercules. Like I said, it's inspired... so in short... it's been Mitchellized.

Dog and His Master....

Here's some drawings of a cartoon series I was developing for myself.
As you can see, I was deliberately going for a Tex Avery, Hanna/Barbera look with funny looking designs and weird facial expressions. I think this would have worked when Funny Cartoons were appreciated, but sadly, if it can't play like an average live action sitcom, most of the execs wouldn't buy it.
Maybe I'll still produce it as an internet cartoon though...

Miceys....

I don't know why, but I've drawn a lot of mice over the years. Here's a few more. I hope you're not too squeamish! Actually, this is a page from my sketchbook and the page size was a little too large for the scanner, but I think I got most of the page in. Just for the record, these sketches were done with a cobalt blue Polychromos pencil.

Some Pen sketches

I like to switch mediums every now and then. I love to work with a thick black crayon or a sharpie to do some quick drawings, but I'll work with anything as long as the tool gives me a nice flowing line. John Kricfalusi introduced me to Primacolour Pencils on Mighty Mouse, The New Adventures, but my favorites are Blaisdell Layout Pencils, Polychromos and the now extinct Blackwing pencils, which I have a few stubs laying around the house somewhere.

Sometimes, I like to take a cheap Bic pen and do some sketches. They're actually pretty great to sketch with and I like the line quality, which kind of resembles that Disney Zerox look of the 60's and 70's. Making drawings with a permanent pen really forces you to think before you lay a line down. I think it's a pretty good exercise from time to time.

The Wonderful World Of Color

Here's two Disney Anthology Show openings. The first is from the Wonderful World Of Color with host Walt Disney. Color ran on NBC from 1961 through 1967 broadcasting some original programming, but mostly material from the Disney library of Feature films, cartoon shorts and nature films. Walt Disney shot informative lead ins and closing footage giving us a glimpse of next weeks show. Unlike the Hanna Barbera title sequences in my previous post, Disney's opening sequence to his show was just a sampling of the fun to follow.

The second opening is from the The Wonderful World Of Disney, which ran on NBC from 1967 through the late 70's. The name change was obviously a tribute to Walt after he passed in 1966 and the idea of a host was eliminated almost entirely (probably because it was thought that nobody could fill Walt's shoes). Occasionally, there would be certain shows that would be hosted by various Disney celebs like Dean Jones, Annette Funicello or Kurt Russell, but most of these shows would have no host at all. This particular opening was well known in the 1970's and would be edited each year to feature a clip from a new Disney movie or theme park attraction. In this particular clip, Space Mountain and The Rescuers are featured prominently, which would date it to 1977. Both clips here are great openings, with theme music by Buddy Baker (a great Disney music man) these openings have a magic that cannot be put into words.

Hanna-Barbera's Best: The Title Sequences

After Yogi Bear, Huckleberry Hound and The Jetsons, Hanna Barbera Productions got into producing very different types of animated programming. Most of these shows were reactive to what was successful at the time and Hanna Barbera were very good about tapping into that. As with most HB shows, the best part of the shows were the opening and closing title sequences, which were anchored by a great theme song, terrific editing of clips from the series and some original animation.
Here's a few examples below and the first we'll begin with is Speed Buggy, which features a great 'driving' theme song matched to good action pieces featuring the main characters. The show is definitely influenced by Disney's The Love Bug (the top box office grosser of 1969) and must have had many curious viewers, but as with other HB shows, the show was never as much fun as the title sequence.



As a kid, The Wacky Races was a pretty fun show to watch. Influenced by many chase films made before it ( i.e., The Great Race, It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad World, etc.)
not only were the opening and closing sequences fun, but the actual episodes had some chuckles too!
The theme music was big and brassy, with neat narration by character actor, Dave Willock and some funny vocal performances by Paul Winchell, everything in this HB show seemed to work...especially the opening and closing sequences.



The Catanooga Cats was a typical HB show that featured three or four different cartoon segments. Often The actual Catanooga Cat cartoons were dreadful, but the short music segments that acted as bumpers had neat bubblegum pop tunes and fast editing. HB once again took the lead from The Monkees and Popular Beatles cartoon in the mid 60's, and started making shows that featured characters that played musical instruments. This extended to The Impossibles, The Banana Splits, Josie & The Pussycats and of course The Catanooga Cats. The best thing about this show is the opening title sequence, with a dynamic pop theme produced By Mike Curb.



I know that some of these tunes may not be everyones' cup of tea, but when the shows first came out, the title sequences did provide a good hook to get the kids to watch. Here below is the title sequence for the HB Abbott & Costello cartoon show.
Once again, the title sequence has a Big Band sound and is hands down the only good thing about this particular cartoon. Good thing HB refrained from having Abbott & Costello play guitars and drums!

OOPS! I did it again!

No, this isn't a post about Britney's Troubles.
The drawing you see here I posted a few hours ago. Well, I did the drawing, thought it looked pretty good and put it up on the blog. But looking at it again about a half hour ago I had second thoughts. Although I liked most of the drawing, there were a few things about the drawing that bothered me, mainly the characters stance. Rather than just pulling down the drawing and keeping it off line, I made a change in one leg and a few minor ones to the rest of the drawing and put it back up here.
Originally the right leg was bent in and didn't like the way the shoe was drawn.
It's light on the drawing but if you look hard you can still see the erased lite blue lines.
It's not a perfect drawing, but I like it better.
I'm very critical about my drawings, that's part of the reason why I haven't posted any drawings over the history of this blog...... A good case of stage fright.
I think you need an ego to create any drawing and it's important to have confidence in your abilities... but it's also important not to be happy with everything you do; meaning that you need to look at your drawings with a fresh eye. That's why most teachers tell you to walk away from your drawing and then come back to it and you'll begin to see the flaws.

Some rough sketches....

Some friends said that I should post some of my rough drawings, so here you go.
I'm a pretty fast artist, as a matter of fact, I can nail one of these drawings somewhere between 30 seconds and a minute, so they're pretty rough sketches, but mostly everything is there. My approach is pretty simple; I think of an idea, get the line of action and then build shapes around that action line. Afterwards I continue to build shapes inside the shapes and then fine tune the details, all under a minute. If the drawing isn't right, I can quickly do another one by using what's right about the previous drawing and then adding or subtracting from it. My drawings are really all about feeling, and even though I use shapes to get the drawing there, I'm more concerned about how a drawing feels.

I've been criticized about my speed. Someone I used to work with called me "Stocko The Clown", because I used to revert to formula poses. I listened to the criticism and took it as constructive criticism. But the fact is, there are many other artists who could also be called the same nickname. That's because we all use stock things that we've learned over the years and we use them because it works in the drawing. And if it looks good in your drawing, you're going to use it over and over.
Milt Kahl, Ward Kimball, Chuck Jones, Frank Thomas and Jim Tyer all used stock poses and expressions...so I guess I'm in good company. That doesn't mean you should stop and not progress as an artist. You should always be looking for different expressions and poses, but you should never throw out something that works either.

My early influences have been many, but the strongest have been Preston Blair, Don Bluth, Fred Moore, Milt Kahl, Ward Kimball, Tex Avery and Chuck Jones. For a while back in the 80's, Bluth was a major influence and I started to follow that look, especially when I went to work for him. I can't tell you how many people told me to break free of that style and I have to a certain extent. But looking at these drawings, I can still see that Don's influence has some hold on me.

The Dana Carvey Show

This post has nothing to do with animation, but it does concern one of my other passions...Good Sketch comedy...and the more off-beat the better.
Long Before The Colbert Report and The Office made Steven Colbert and Steve Carell household names, they were featured players on a very funny but short lived program on ABC called The Taco Bell Dana Carvey Show. It was cancelled pretty shortly after it premiered, but for the eight and 1/2 minutes that it lasted, it had some pretty funny bits and pieces. Not all the sketches were gems, but they had more hits than misses.
And a few were pure gold.

YAKKO'S WORLD

After finishing work on Tiny Toon Adventures, the staff at Warner Bros. went to work developing Animaniacs. A few months into development when we were locking down the stars of the show, I went ahead to animate some Walk cycles for Yakko, Wakko and Dot, which were received by the producers in a great way. Immediately after development, we went right into production minus our layout crew. We were told to draw our storyboards tighter in order to use them as layouts for the animators overseas.
Eliminating layout might have saved the producers some money in the short run, but it put tremendous pressures on the storyboard crew.
Yakko's World wasn't the first cartoon to be storyboarded (for me that was The Big Candy Store) but it was the most labor intensive.

When I was presented with the script, it was just the lyrics for the song matched to the Mexican Hat Dance. Since I sometimes take things too literal, I thought that it might be a magical kind of idea to have Yakko doing the Mexican Hat Dance, while pulling hats out of thin air representing the countries that he mentions in the song. So to get the full picture, hats would be appearing, disappearing, swallowing up Yakko and finally for the finale', exploding as he reaches the final verse of the cartoon. I thought it was a great idea because it felt like a throw back to some of that great animation from The Three Caballeros, Dumbo and some of those amazing WB Clampett cartoons.
I was really excited at the opportunity to do something absolutely surreal for network TV. So, the first thing that had to be done was the research. I looked in book stores and in libraries for all the different hats worn around the world. I researched customs, clothing, dances..anything that would aid me in boarding the cartoon. Then I set down to work, roughing out my Yakko's World masterpiece. I spent the better part of two weeks roughing out the short cartoon. Unfortunately, most of the research ate into my boarding time. I was late with the storyboard and although the production execs cut me some slack for a few extra days, patience was wearing thin. Finally, I stayed up late one night and finished the thing. I was sure that all would be forgiven once they saw what I came up with.
The next morning, my director and I were asked to present the storyboard to the producer. Armed with my masterpiece we proceeded upstairs to The Producer's office where we sat down and started to pitch Yakko's World. I flipped over the title page, showed my boss how Yakko leaps into frame and starts in with the hats when he stopped me.
"What th' #&%^@# is this?
Just have him point to the countries on a map!"
I looked at my Director and then back to the producer and then quietly exited the office with my masterwork in hand.
The only thing salvaged from the original board was...the title page and.....
page one where Yakko leaps in. The rest found a home as a giant wee wee pad for my dog.

I was given another two weeks to RE-board Yakko's World with him pointing to a map.
Again, I had to get some research (mainly a map) to accurately represent the countries that Yakko points to. Unfortunately, that was just the beginning on the headaches of working on this thing. First off, some of these countries are so small that they don't really register on the screen and second off, the writer of the songs' new lyrics had problems rhyming certain nations together. So in using creative license, he used so called nations like 'San Juan' to rhyme with Guam. San Juan was easy for me to figure out as a city in Puerto Rico but others were not as easy, and I have to say that I probably lost some hair due to the stress that Yakko's World put me through.
The third problem was that the song moves pretty fast and there's not a whole lot of business that you can do between the short breaks. That was important to me because I thought the whole thing of pointing to countries was pretty boring.
To help perk things up a bit, I had the countries light up as Yakko points to them, which you really had to do because many of these countries wouldn't be seen because of their size...plus remember that Yakko is pointing to these places at lightning speed.
Another thing I incorporated was a little dance that Groucho Marx once did for (I believe) the movie Animal Crackers. One of our staff guys (I apologize for not remembering his name) animated this little dance with Yakko that was inspired by Groucho's dance in Crackers. Since it was a development type thing that wasn't being used in production, I thought some of it might fit within the breaks and liven up the thing, so I called for it.
The other thing that I did was to have Yakko roll up in the map at the end, instead of the explosion of hats that I had in the original version. It just seemed like a good way to finish it up.
I expected a good number of changes when it went for approval, but none were requested and it went into animation without a hitch. A few months later, I was called into editorial to see the finished version. Everybody, (myself included) was quite pleased with it.
I recall being surprised that it was very entertaining.
Warner's Executive Brass thought that it was so good that the cartoon was run in The Warner Stores and on The Fox Network as a teaser, months before the show hit the airwaves.
Pretty much the way I boarded it is the way you see it on the screen.
So here it is...Yakko's World.