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.

Making A Hanna Barbera Cartoon!

From the early 60s', Joe Barbera and William Hanna explain the process of animation from the Hanna Barbera perspective. I've never ever seen this before so this is pretty cool. I think HB's early product is terrific because there's still a whole lot of care in the preparation of their animated shorts. The drawings are well drafted, the timing works, colors look neat and the voices are great. Unfortunately, somewhere after the sale of their studio to Taft Broadcasting around 1966, the studio fell over a cliff!
Don't get me wrong...there was still good things coming out from Hanna Barbera, just not so much. Anyhow, this stuff still fascinates me! HB's early animated cartoons like Ruff and Reddy were made for a budget of just under $ 4000 for a 5 minute animated cartoon. By the time they got to the Flintstones, the quality was upped and the budget became $35,000 for a half hour television show. I know it sounds like chicken feed today but the Rocky and Bullwinkle show had a budget that was paltry in comparision, roughly 1/4 the Budget of a Flintstones half hour!