Disney's Stories

Ever since I was a little kid there have been 3 things I loved to do more than any other. One, as evidenced by this picture, was performance.
This was during a visit from our grandparents- we decided to put on a show for them and it ended up being a reenactment of the "Dance of the Hours" sequence from the Disney film, Fantasia. We went all-out with the costuming, and really got into our roles. I got my brother to be the crocodile, using his green raincoat, green pants and green slippers and a red sweater for a cape; my sisters wore their gymnastic leotards to take on the role of hippos and ostriches. As the elephant, I went all in grey; grey hoodie and sweatpants, grey socks on my arms and feet, with a grey sock on a bent-up clothes hanger for a trunk, and a grey clip-on tie for a tail. The sign my sisters are holding up said, "The End," naturally (an early attempt at Brechtian techniques?). I guess this was also my earliest foray into the world of theatrical directing.

Disney movies seem to have played a role in a lot of my earliest inspirations.

The other two things I loved best were writing stories and drawing. In the room where I was supposed to work on schoolwork, we had a mickey mouse lamp, looking pretty much exactly like these pictures I dug up from ebay:
I still have the lamp, but the shade, being probably just as old as I was, crumbled years ago and was replaced by a more generic one. But while the shade still existed, I used to look at the characters on it, and one day c. 1990 (I would have been probably 8 then), when I was supposed to be doing math or something, I took some scrap paper and tried to copy the characters, then on the back of the papers I wrote a short story about each of them. Actually, looking at some of these, and given how young I was, I think now that I may have just put the paper up the the light and traced them. But I was proud of my accomplishment at the time...

on the page above you can see a partially erased rendition of one of the chipmunks.
maybe next time I'll put something up that wasn't traced...

We'n'sday Comics Volume 1 Issue 6

previous issues:

vol. 1, iss. 1
vol. 1, iss. 2
vol. 1, iss. 3
vol. 1, iss. 4
vol. 1, iss. 5

Benchmark

This is me, playing with my park bench background painting, putting in different characters and coloring them on the comp to see how they look. some, better than others.

Crow has "Toupee" for the bald man's humiliation.

The squirrel is about to explode with excitement from the rabbit's nutty gift.

and the turtle is probably going to be accosted for vagrancy.

Turtle Napper

here are more of my recent drawings from my sketchbooks...

BG- it stands for BackGround, not the Brothers Gibb

Mission accomplished!
no, the novel isn't done yet. But since i got ahead a little last night, when i got up this morning, I had time to work on my background painting for the animated scene I am working on. And now it's finished! That means it's time for the real work to begin. Here is a look at the background, with some old drawings of my characters colored to get an idea how they will look against the BG.


This is a palette of colors i gathered to use in choosing the paint colors for the BG. I got them by finding a bunch of pretty photos online and pulling out patches of color so i could see what went into the specific color schemes of each photo that made it so appealing.


Then i went with a combo of these colors that i chose from these by scribbling out some different ideas over my layout drawing in photoshop.


These are some sketches i did to try and finalize the construction of the characters, particularly the crow, who i find especially troublesome to draw from certain angles.


I can't decide yet whether i want to go with the version of the turtle below or the one in the first picture, where the top of his head just rises above the top of his eyes. I'm leaning toward this one.

Oh, well, back to the novel. I still have another 22600-ish words to go.

~the Jerk

Parked on the Bench

I have decided upon my next project- a full scene of animation, with a bit of dialogue, painted background, and the whole nine yards. I was going to call it "speaking of the weather," but that title was taken back in '37 by Warner's director Frank Tashlin.

I took a bit of dialogue I had come up with a while ago, and built a small scene around it using my Crow and Turtle characters (those aren't their names, just their species- I haven't decided what to name them yet, or even if such apellations are necessary).
I already have the whole scene planned out- I drew my "Storyboards" on strips of scrap paper I had lying around- 11" x 1.25". The drawings are little more than (and often less than) thumbnail sketches, but it was helpful to get down on paper everything that I want to get into the scene.
More to come as i progress on this project!

~The Jerk

P.S. Here is an object of possible interest- a while ago when I created the turtle character, and found it difficult to drawing him from different angles, I sculpted a small 3d model out of wood and painted it, to give me an idea of how he would look from any angle. As I don't have a digital camera, here are some pictureso got by laying the model on my scanner bed.

Someone's Cravin' Raven...

I just submitted my entry to the Pitch Your Movie Contest on IMDB.com. this is it.