Ghana

Here's my contribution to the 'home' theme of the Art Blocks for Ghana project.  I found out Ghana means Warrior King & I wanted to incorporate forms found in African sculpture so I tried to incorporate all this & ended up with this Warrior King relaxing at home with his pregnant wife and first born son.

These exploratory thumbnails show my thought process-I started out with the image of a communal tree or village, playing around with sculptural iconography.  I guess it's all pretty cliched stuff, certainly not representative of modern Ghana. I was thinking of imagery from a more primitive time in the past.  The meaning of the word Ghana led me to the 'Warrior King' motif which I eventually combined with the 'home' theme for the final image.

(Thanks to Don Shank for the Gesso tip!)

Walt Disney Family Museum

 On a wet weekend in San Francisco recently I visited the Walt Disney Family Museum which opened in the Presidio last year.  It's a very impressive, state of the art installation with oodles of interesting artifacts to offer animation fans.




Walt's childhood and family history is chronicled in fascinating detail. The Disney clan started in France then settled in Ireland before America.   Letters, photos & artifacts such as Walt's Dad's fiddle really bring alive the period young Walt grew up in.  His tough upbringing on a Kansas farm seemed to forge the man he would become-he reminisced about rising at 3am to do a paper round giving a sense of a work ethic instilled by his stern but loving father.

 There are fascinating photos of Walt's early animation days with Hugh Harman & Rudi Ising and an account of the fateful meeting with Ub Iwerks & their subsequent partnership. Supporting the history are dozens of tastefully chosen pieces of art from the Disney films; from original art from the Skeleton Dance and Steam Boat Willie,  through animation drawings of all the films of the 'Golden Age'.  Even the very first design of Mickey is there.

There is an exquisite little maquette of Ferdinand the bull that I'd never seen previously.  Marc Davis' Bambi designs, Milt Kahl's Pinocchio rough sketches, Fred Moore centaurettes from Fantasia, mind-boggling Bill tytla drawings of Chernabog, Eyvind Earl background paintings from Sleeping Beauty, the multi-plane camera, tiny Kay Nielsen paintings . . . Probably the most interesting article for animation fans was a scrapbook put together by Disney Effects expert Herman Schultheis.  It's displayed open in a case but a nearby videoscreen flips through its pages.  It's a collection of behind the scenes photographs, notes & drawings detailing the production of Fantasia

Mary Blair  is well represented with many original paintings including gorgeous colour designs for  It's A Small World.
One of Mary's studio cabinets is on display along with a hard hat made for her by workers on the construction of It's A Small World.



Read more about Mary

 Disney's move into TV during the 50s throws up an amusing anecdote: during production of 'Man And The Moon' Ward Kimball consulted Werner von Braun who phoned him on the day of the first US space mission to tell him "You see, they're following our script!"

(You can read a good article on Man And The Moon here)

The exhibition culminates with a huge model of Disneyland

The Walt Disney Family Museum is heaven for Disney/animation fans.  The entrance fee is rather expensive ($20) but it's worth it -you could literally spend all day in there. . . and it's situated in a beautiful part of San Francisco in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge.

You can view a photo-tour of the museum  here

Another skirmish in the gesture class

I struggled a lot in Gesture Class last week. Alex Woo was back leading the class & he encourages us to relate the pose to story.  Before putting pencil to paper think of a situation or character and let that inform the sketch.  It does affect the decisions you make while drawing and should make for more interesting poses.  However with 30secs-2mins I found it tricky to come up with a scenario AND get the pose down.  Everyone else made amazing sketches where the model was a ballerina or diving into a swimming pool.  I must work on this. I feel like I went backwards in my drawing but forwards in my thinking.

Towards the end of the session I started to get into the groove and work story ideas into the sketches rather than getting caught up in anatomy.

Gesture Class

Since seeing the Disney Disney Sample Portfolio in 1996 & subsequently studying Glenn Vilppu's books & Walt Stanchfeld's notes I've wanted to take part in a 'gesture class'.  It seemed something that was the sole province of the American animation studios.  Regular life-drawing classes in the UK just never offered what I was looking for:-quick, dynamic poses from models who could act a little.  Sure there were times when we did short or even moving poses but never in costume or with relevant props.  Sensing my needs one time a life class tutor asked the model to make more dynamic, more animated poses.  The model scoffed "you mean like bugs bunny?" and promptly sat on a chair believing that to be dynamic!

Anyway, now I've found a regular gesture drawing class here are my first results. 

30 second warm-ups with the model in his karate outfit!

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Here we moved into longer, 2 minute poses.  Still quite quick but the poses were great.

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The next model started off in a bikini & a large, floppy sun-hat for the 30 second poses.

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For the 2 minute poses she changed into an old time pioneer house-wife.

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Recent Activity

Just before leaving the UK I visited my old art college back home in Bangor, North Wales.  I was asked to talk to the students about my career path since I studied there.  They had only just started their Art Foundation course so I tried to impress upon them the importance of carrying a sketchbook & let them look through the one I had with me.

I looked in on the students in the life-drawing room, it felt strange to be back in the same room where I began my art education 15 years ago!  The model hasn't aged so well though!

I also had the opportunity to visit Ronald Searle again with Uli Meyer.  Once more we were treated to old school, classy hospitality by the Searles who wined & dined us for another memorable afternoon in Provence.  We arrived well before lunch which enabled me to sketch the beautiful village square as we relaxed at the café terrasse.

In San Francisco last weekend I went along to APE to support some of my friends & colleagues who had booths.  The incredible artistry of their comics & sketchbooks makes me want to join in next year with an offering of my own.  Katy Wu's Tiger Bee was one of my favourite finds.

She was also part of the 'Round Robin' book with Dani Strijleva and Jennifer Chang.  Their table was very popular at the expo.  They were flanked by messrs Josh Cooley, Bill Presing and speed painter extraordinaire Scott Morse.

Across the hall my colleague Jamie Baker was on a table next to the Anthology 451 boys; Kris Pearn, John Hoffman and Craig Berry.  They were in the comic-con seasoned company of Ted Mathot and Derek 'Monster' Thompson.

Photo by Elaine Wu

PIXAR: 25 Years of Animation

Last weekend before starting work I swotted up on Pixar history at the Oakland Museum where the 'Art of Pixar Animation' has returned after a worldwide tour. I first saw the show at London's Science Museum back in 2006. It has been updated since then to include artwork & maquettes from RATATOUILLE, WALL-E, UP & TOY STORY 3.



Lou Romano's UP gouache paintings, Simon Varela's charcoal studies for NEMO and Kent Melton's sculpts of THE INCREDiBLES are the highlights for me. The ARTSCAPE projection is even better now it flies through WALL-E, RATATOUILLE and UP artwork and the TOY STORY zoetrope is still mesmerising.

PIXAR!

Illustration for BBC Wales website article.

Welsh version here.

Over 20 years ago I saw John Lasseter on TV talking about KNICK KNACK and how he studied Chuck Jones cartoons professionally & felt he had never truly worked a day in his life because he got paid to do what he loves!  This sounded like the job for me!

I started animation school just as TOY STORY was released and of course Pixar became the studio to work for. 15 years and thousands of drawings later it's with great pleasure that I accepted Pixar's invitation to join their story dept.
It's been a long wait with the interview process & visa issues but I'll finally be moving to San Francisco this week to start work the beginning of October on a top secret project that I know nothing about-so don't ask!

I've tried to see as much of Europe as possible over the past year drawing along the way.  I'm looking forward to exploring San Francisco and northern California as much as I can.  But I feel that I'm going to be really busy on the film for the next couple years . . .

My local newspaper ran a story on me with a pic of me climbing out of a Norwegian fjord!

The Daily Post picked up on the Norway trip too here.

New promo posters have been released for the last 2 films I worked on.  They will be released in 2011

Spain pt.3

Here's the final part of my Spanish odyssey. From Zaragoza we went back north to SanSebastian via Pamplona.  Then a long drive south east through stunning scenery.  We stopped half way in Huesca before pushing on towards the coast.

Sitges is a very pleasant town on the Med where the guys wear tighter shorts than the girls. It's a resort town but once again we were unimpressed by Spanish campsites- this one was right next to the main road.

Next morning we took the coastal road north to Barcelona where a friend had arranged a nice room in a hostel for us.  After 2 weeks in tents we were happy to lie in beds again!  We spent a couple of days in the city taking in the Parc Guell, Picasso Museum, the Sagrada Familia and the Fondacion Joan Miro.

In the evenings we dined in the lively Born district close to the gothic quarter-fantastic tapas!

Leaving Barcelona proved tricky without sat nav-we spent an hour going up and down the wrong highway twice before finding the right route north.  We were looking to make Figueres our next stop-Salvador Dali country!

Dali was born in Figueres later settling in Port Lligat on the north east coast close to Cadaques.  We toured the suitably bizarre & surreal egg-turreted museum in Figueres.  This place is astounding- packed with Dali's art & possessions.

Cadaques & Port Lligat are quite secluded-a winding drive from Figueres up over the mountain down to the coast.  Port Ligat is still unspoilt -its shallow harbour occupied only by fishing boats. The natural bay recognizable from the landscapes in Dali's paintings.

He lived here in a huge white villa adorned with giant eggs like the museum in Figueres.

After over 2 weeks on the road & camping we were ready to head home.  We crossed the border at Perpignan and burned through France via Carcassone, Orleans, Fontainebleau and Paris. In the French capital we caught up with Bibo and crew who are continuing work on 'A Monster In Paris' -the film I worked on between 2006 and 2008.

Next day re-energized we completed the last leg of the trip back to Calais then London.  After 3 weeks, over a dozen different camp-sites, several world-class museums & countless warm cans of beer I had accomplised my Quixotic goal -to see Picasso's Guernica.  Along the way we made some new friends, caiught up with old ones and took in more amazing scenery than I can remember.  We drove thousands of kilometres yet only covered the top right-hand quarter of the country.  Some day I'll return to see the rest . . .




You can read part 1 here and part 2 here. My map 'journal' of the entire trip is here.

En plein air

LIFE just posted a great pictorial on artists & their models.  Seems like in the US they like to draw the nude outside.   I'm moving to northern California in a couple of weeks so I'm looking forward to partaking in some of these al fresco life drawing classes.

Wonder what the view was like from the back ? (I mean the other back)

Summer Exhibitions

This year I saw three major Picasso exhibitions.  Even better than the London Gagosian show was the Peace & Freedom exhibition at Tate Liverpool.  Focusing on Picasso's often little noted role as a political activist, peace campaigner, supporter of women's causes and feminist.

The highlight is the Charnel House (1945) but I was particularly struck by Lobster vs. Cat!

Sargent and the Sea at the Royal Academy, London was a smallish exhibition in the 1st floor gallery space but packed with goodies from Sargent's early career. Travels around the Med and across the Atlantic bred a fascination with the sea and those who live around and work on it.  There were dynamic sketches of life on deck during trans-atlantic crossings.  The paintings of Mediterranean folk are a masterclass in expressive loose painting techniques.

Recently opened at Tate Britain, London is a fascinating look at the life and career of pioneer photographer Eadweard Muybridge.  Of course as an animation artist I'm familiar with his locomotion studies but I wasn't aware of his parallel career photographing northern California.  He made stunning landscape shots of Yosemite, lighthouses along the Pacific Coast, the Farallon Islands and giant Redwoods.  He had settled in San Francisco and it was railroad tycoon John Stanford who first commissioned Muybridge to settle the 'flying horse' debate.  Muybridge made an impressive panoramic study of San Francisco from the roof of Mark Hopkins'mansion on Nob Hill.  More intimate studies of the interiors of these mansions gave an insight into the world of the 'railway rich' around the turn of the last century before it was decimated by the earthquake and fire of 1906.

Muybridge really led an extraordinary life-a self made man born in England who made a name for himself in California.  He pioneered early photographic techniques, reinvented himself as Helios and made a fortune flogging postcards.  He later shot his wife's lover in the face and literally got away with murder!   He's influenced everyone from Francis Bacon and David Hockney to animators and film-makers.  Someday a biopic film will be made of Muybridge and his luxuriant beard. (Apparently Philip Glass based his 1982 opera The Photographer on Muybridge's life).

This is Muybridge in the shot above contemplating his next career move.