Wash Painting 2: More Happy Accidents

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.

In case you missed my previous post on this subject, take a look at Wash Painting Part One: In Praise of Happy Accidents.


All of the images you see in this and the previous post come from two issues of Colliers from 1934. Every week, the staff artists had to quickly produce striking images to accompany the articles. Speed was of the essence. Wash painting was a quick and beautiful solution.


One week, an artist might be illustrating a romance...


The next week a Western adventure...


The technique lent itself to both realistic depiction and cartoony stylization.

If you haven't checked them out yet, make sure to take a look at our previous posts on mid 30s Colliers illustrations and late 40s Colliers. There's a wealth of great images in old magazines like this.


Many thanks to Mike Fontanelli for sharing these with us. He has a stack of Colliers with Earl Oliver Hurst covers that he will be bringing by soon. I can't wait to see those.


Here's the rest of the Famous Artists lesson on wash painting. Let me know in the comments if you give this lesson a try.



FAMOUS ARTISTS ON WASH PAINTING PART TWO: Step By Step Through Paintings By Dohanos and Whitcomb









One last thing... Often when people speak of transparent water colors in animation, they refer to it as an "old fashioned" technique...


But there's nothing old fashioned about watercolor painting. Check out the great watercolors by Archive supporter William K. Moore...


Bill paints people he finds on the streets in Bogota, Columbia. Browse through his blog and be amazed at his keen observation and boundless imagination. This man paints a painting every day of his life! That makes him a hero in my book.

If you enjoyed this post, see... Wash Painting Part One: In Praise of Happy Accidents, Mid 30s Colliers Illustrations, Late 40s Colliers, Lawson Wood: The Monkey Artist, Complete Guide To Cartooning On Magazine Cartoons Part One and Part Two.

Also check out these lessons from the Famous Artists Course... Chad's Design For Television, Willard Mullin on Drawing Animals, Fundamentals of Composition Part One and Part Two.

Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive

Stumble It!

Wash Painting: In Praise Of Happy Accidents

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.


Archive supporter, Mike Fontanelli brought by a stack of mid-1930s Colliers magazines for us to digitize. Colliers was the "Rolls Royce" of weekly magazines for many years, employing some of the greatest illustrators in the business. (Check out our previous postings of mid 1930s and late 40s issues, as well as our posts on Lawson Wood and Earl Oliver Hurst.) In browsing through page after page of beautiful wash paintings, I was struck by how rare it is to see illustrations like this any more. That's just plain wrong.


In our digital age, programs like Photoshop have replaced brush and pen. But Photoshop doesn't come close to the flexibility and variety that water painting can provide. And in the hands of an experienced artist, a brush can knock out a finished painting much faster than with a computer. It just takes advance planning, concentration and an experienced hand.


Look at the beautiful compositions in these examples. The artists were working from a carefully constructed drawing, and they worked out every detail before paint touched paper. The light source and the value scale are precisely controlled to make the image "mesh" in your eye. There's no wasted effort or extraneous detail. The paintings themselves were executed very quickly.


That's the exact opposite of the way that a digital image is created. Instead of making all the creative decisions up front, the digital artist makes those decisions as he paints. In Photoshop, it's typical to build up the illustration in layers, stacking up planes that can be shifted around as needed. The composition evolves, created in sections and joined with blurred seams to connect them. This evolutionary process may result in an image that is acceptably complex, but it doesn't lend itself to creating a strong or unified statement.

Recently, I saw a cityscape background from an animated feature that had been created by cutting and pasting pieces of images together. The light came from six different directions. The perspective changed from one part of the image to another. If you looked at any one small section, it looked OK, but the whole didn't work together. The overall impression was cacophony. Worse yet, the image looked terrible if it was reduced in size or resolution. The scale of the overall composition and the degree of detail was uniform across the entire image. When you resized or reduced the resolution, it all turned to mush.

Contrast that with these beautiful wash paintings... The overall composition reads no matter how small you make it, and there's a lot of variety between sharp details (in the faces and hands) and loose brushwork (in the fabric and backgrounds). This keeps your eye focused on the important part of the composition. But there's an even bigger difference... Even when enlarged many times, these paintings still look good because of what watercolor painters refer to as the "happy accidents". Any digital anomaly or seam between layers in a Photoshop image will stand out like a sore thumb, but a loose brush stroke, a bit of paper peeking through the dry brush, or a bleeding bit of pigment can look beautiful. The accidents are natural looking.


I figured there might be a few of you out there who will be sitting at home with your belly full of turkey this weekend needing a diversion... a project to sharpen your art skills. Here's a lesson from the fabulous Famous Artists Course. Pull out your brushes and some lamp black and give it a try. Have fun!

FAMOUS ARTISTS ON WASH PAINTING PART ONE: The Fundamentals Of Wash Painting








For The Rest Of This Lesson, See... WASH PAINTING 2: MORE HAPPY ACCIDENTS



If you enjoyed this post, see... Mid 30s Colliers Illustrations, Late 40s Colliers, Lawson Wood: The Monkey Artist, Complete Guide To Cartooning On Magazine Cartoons Part One and Part Two.

Also check out these lessons from the Famous Artists Course... Chad's Design For Television, Willard Mullin on Drawing Animals, Fundamentals of Composition Part One and Part Two.

Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive

Stumble It!

Illustration: Coronet Magazine 1945

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for more jaw dropping examples of classic illustration.



Archive supporter, Rich Borowy stopped by to digitize some classic Stan Freberg radio shows for the archive database yesterday. Under his arm was a box of old Coronet and Omnibook magazines. Rich said that he was given the box at a garage sale that was closing down. I've never looked at these particular magazines, but they have wonderful illustrations and features. Here are highlights from the December, 1945 issue. Check it out. There's a big surprise at the end. Thanks for bringing these in, Rich!

Each issue opens with an inspirational message and illustration. This one is by illustrator, Vera Bock. Many issues contain the work of Arthur Szyk, whose book The New Order we featured last year. I'll be doing a whole post of Szyk illustrations from Coronet soon.


Next up is a retelling of "The Night Before Christmas" by Golden Book illustrator, Sheilah Beckett. Will Finn recently posted about her book on Gilbert & Sullivan Operettas. These pages strongly resemble the back of Little Golden Books. Do you think Sheilah Beckett designed that?




Here's a feature on the artists who created the Famous Artists Course... Stevan Dohanos, along with his illustrator friends Albert Dorne, Ben Stahl, Hardie Gramatky, Fred Ludekens and Dean Cornwall donated their services to decorate casts in the Halloran Army Hospital in New York.



And here's a feature on exotic superstitions and religious beliefs by Stevan Dohanos...



Here's a real surprise- The autobiography of Bugs Bunny! "A Hare Grows In Manhattan"...









If you enjoyed this post, check out... Little Verses Part One, Part Two and Part Three, Baby's House, Arthur Szyk's The New Order and Artzybasheff's Neurotica, Machinalia and Diablerie.

Thanks
Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive

Stumble It!

Media: Willard Mullin on Animals

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.


A couple of months ago, we posted a section of the Famous Artists Design Course... Chad's Design For Television. Today, we are bringing you another Famous Artists article, this time from the Cartooning Course... Willard Mullin on Animals.

Willard Mullin was a type of cartoonist that doesn't exist any more... a newspaper sports page cartoonist. In the days before high speed film and well lit night games, newspapers relied on cartoonists to illustrate the sports stories that photographers were unable to shoot. They did this by caricaturing the players and utilizing team mascots to represent who was on top and who was in the doghouse.

Mullin was not only the greatest sports cartoonist of his day, he was also one of the most talented artists ever to work in newspaper comics. His drawings are dynamic and full of energy and life. His lines flow beautifully, while still defining the solid forms that underly his drawings. When it came to drawing animals, he was unmatched. I hope you find this useful in your own work.








These pages provide just a small sample of Mullin's work. If you can, find a copy of his book, "A Hand In Sports". It's packed with wonderful sketches by this underappreciated cartoonist.

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

As an added treat, here is an early Mullin piece celebrating the victory of the horse, Omaha in the 1935 Kentucky Derby. Archive supporter, Ted Watts found this treasure in a thrift store and generously allowed us to scan it for the archive. Amazing stuff!



Our friend, Will Finn has been posting some great Willard Mullin cartoons on his site... See Part One, Part Two, Part Three, and Part Four

If you enjoyed this post, see... Clair Weeks Animal Studies 1940.

Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive

8.07.08
.

Stumble It!

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
.

Stumble It!