Media: Chad's Design For Television (1960)

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see reason number 8 on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great art instruction posts.

Remember those matchbooks that said "Draw Me!" on the front? They advertised a correspondence course called "Famous Artists". Everyone made fun of "draw Binky the Skunk any size but the same size"; but the truth of the matter was that the Famous Artists Course was no laughing matter- it was one of the best art instructional courses ever created.

Founded by Norman Rockwell in the early 1950s, Famous Artists had three courses... Painting, Illustration/Design and Cartooning. Each course consisted of 24 lessons in three oversized binders covering a wide variety of subjects. Each month, a new lesson would arrive in the mail. The student would read the program material, complete the assignment, and mail it back to the school, where a professional artist would critique it and offer suggestions.

To design the courses, Rockwell brought together the top artists of the day... Albert Dorne, Stevan Dohanos, Rube Goldberg, Milton Caniff, Al Capp, Willard Mullen, Virgil Partch, and Whitney Darrow Jr, among others. The result was a correspondence course that puts many current university programs to shame.

There were two editions of the Famous Artists Courses. The first was published in the early fifties, and the second was published almost 10 years later. There were differences between the two, especially in the Design/Illustration course. A concluding chapter written by the cartoonist known simply as "Chad" was added in the second edition. It deals with design for television.

Chad (last name Grothkopf) was eminently qualified to write this chapter. After leaving the Disney Studios in 1938, he was hired by NBC to create the very first commercials for television. At this time, there were approximately fifty television sets in the entire country! Chad also worked in comic books, most notably in Fawcett's Funny Animals series, for which he created the character "Hoppy the Marvel Bunny", a rabbit superhero. He passed away in January of 2005 at the age of 89.

The ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive is fortunate to have a complete set of the Famous Artists courses, and we began digitizing them for inclusion in the database today. The first article we scanned was Chad's introduction to the TV design chapter, and his discussion of the storyboard. These scans are quite large, but the size was necessary to clearly reproduce the text and details in this fascinating article. I hope you find them useful.













"In this ever-growing field of television, the visual language is supreme, and the artist is the king. So far, there are no famous artists in this young medium. Maybe you will be one of them." --Chad (1960)

The Famous Artists school is still in operation. Visit their website at www.famous-artists-school.com.

If you found this post to be interesting, see more great educational material in our collection... Willard Mullin on Animals, ZIM's Cartoons and Caricatures and How To Draw Funny Pictures, W. L. Evans Cartooning and Caricature Course Brochure, Lesson One and Lesson Two, Preston Blair and John K's $100K Animation Drawing Course, Gene Byrnes' Complete Guide To Cartooning Part One: The Men Behind The Newspaper Comics, Part Two: How To Get Ideas / Studies of Comic Strips, Part Three: Single Panel and Sports Cartoonists, Part Four: Editorial Cartoons & Comic Books, Part Five: Sketching, Part Six: Magazine Cartooning and Part Seven: Magazine Cartooning (continued); Nat Falk's "How To Make Animated Cartoons" Part One: The History of Animation, Part Two: The Cartoon Studios, Part Three: How Cartoons Are Made, Part Four: How To Draw Cartoons and Part Five: How To Animate.

Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive

7.3.08
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