Illustration: Huckleberry Hound Builds A House

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see reason number 3 on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great posts about Golden Book illustrators.


We scanned another Golden Book today... Huckleberry Hound Builds A House. Published in 1959, this was one of the earliest Hanna Barbera books, and it's one of the best. The early H-B characters were beautifully designed and perfectly suited to the TV medium. This book was illustrated by Harvey Eisenberg and Al White.








If you found this to be useful, see also... Harvey Eisenberg's Foxy Fagan Comics, Bozo And His Rocket Ship, Rojankovsky's Frog Went A Courting, Tibor Gergely's A Day In The Jungle, Gustaf Tenggren's The Little Trapper, Uncle Remus Stories Part One and Part Two, Little Verses Part One, Part Two and The New Golden Song Book Part One, Part Two and Part Three.

Thanks
Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive

04.30.08
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Illustration: Lawson Wood Monkey Mania

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for more jaw dropping images from classic illustrated books and magazines.


Here are more great monkey paintings by Lawson Wood. If you missed our previous posts on this great illustrator, see the links at the bottom of this post.











Thanks to Mike Fontanelli and Will Finn for contributing these great vintage illustrations.

If you enjoyed this post, see... Lawson Wood: The Monkey Painter, More Fabulous Monkey Paintings, Wartime Era Colliers, Mid 30s Colliers Illustrations, Mid 30s Advertisements, Late 40s Colliers, Casey Strikes Out In Coronet, Bugs Bunny in Coronet Magazine December 1945, Milton Caniff in Coronet Magazine, Dispatch From Disney's Part One and Part Two, John Held Jr, Ward Kimball in Escapade, Complete Guide To Cartooning On Magazine Cartoons Part One and Part Two, and Rube Goldberg's Side Show.

Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive
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Illustration: More of Willy Pogany's Mother Goose

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see reason number 3 on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great posts about children's book illustrators.


I'm working on several projects at once right now, and there are two great posts coming up soon. One deals with the writing process for animation and the other is a re-evaluation of a major comic strip artist. But these subjects are large, and they require some extra work, so there may be a little gap before I can get them online. In the meantime, here's more from Willy Pogany's Mother Goose.

















One last image (racially insensitive)

If you would like to find out more about Willy Pogany, see... Willy Pogany's Mother Goose Part One, Life Drawing: Willy Pogany's Drawing Lessons and Pogany's Sketchbook

See also... Milo Winter's Aesop For Children, Lorioux's Fables De La Fontaine Part One and Part Two, Felix Lorioux's Tom Thumb, Puss in Boots, Fables De La Fontaine Part One and Part Two, Le Buffon des Enfants, Mabel Lucie Attwell's Peter Pan and Wendy, Einar Norelius' Bland Tomtar Och Troll 1929 and 1934, John Bauer's Bland Tomtar Och Troll 1917, More Norelius and Bauer, Arthur Rackham's Grimm's Fairy Tales Part One and Part Two, Kay Nielsen's East of the Sun and West of the Moon and Hansel & Gretel, Dulac's H.C. Andersen Part One and Part Two, Little Verses Part One and Part Two, and Rojankovsky's Frog Went A-Courtin'.

Thanks
Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive
.

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Illustration: A Visual Feast

I'm in the process of revamping our Jump Page in anticipation of our bi-annual fundraising drive which begins May 1st. The massive amount of posts linked there are bunched into poorly organized clumps, so it's time for some housework. As I revise the sections, I will post them to give you a chance to check out all the incredible things we've brought you over the past two and a half years. I hope this will inspire you to support us with a contribution in May.

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Illustration


The ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive isn't just an archive OF animation... it's an archive FOR animators. There's a subtle but important distinction there... One of the aspects of modern animation that could stand improvement is design. Too many current animated films ignore the importance of appealing design, or lean too heavily on the designs of other animated films. There's absolutely no reason why every princess, king or mouse should look like princesses, kings and mice from previous films. There's a wide world of design inspiration to be found in the history of illustration. Here's just a sampling of the important material related to illustration contained in the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Database...

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CLASSIC ILLUSTRATION


One of the primary projects of the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive is to gather together the reference materials that inspired the artists who made animated cartoons in the golden age. It's a little known fact that every animation studio had a library of children's books for the reference of the background painters and designers. Rare editions of Rackham, Dulac and Wyeth sat on the shelves at studios in both New York and in Hollywood. Many great children's book illustrators worked for a time in animation, including Kay Nielsen, Gustaf Tenggren and Willy Pogany.

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BLAND TOMTAR OCH TROLL: John Bauer 1915 / Einar Norelius 1929 / Einar Norelius 1934 / Bauer & Norelius 1944 & 1949

KAY NIELSEN: East of the Sun and West of the Moon / Twelve Dancing Princesses / Hansel & Gretel

ARTHUR RACKHAM: Grimm's Fairy Tales Part One / Part Two

EDMUND DULAC; Hans Christian Anderson Part One and Part Two / Poe's Poetical Works / Tanglewood Tales

MILO WINTER: Aesop For Children

FELIX LORIOUX: Tom Thumb / Cinderella / Puss in Boots / Fables de la Fontaine Part One and Part Two / Le Buffon des Enfants: Insects

GUSTAF TENGGREN (CLASSIC STYLE): Small Fry And The Winged Horse / D'Aulnoy's Fairy Tales, Good Dog Book / Heidi - Wonderbook - Juan & Juanita / Grimms Fairy Tales Part One and Part Two (See also Gustaf Tenggren under Golden Book Style below.)

WILLY POGANY: Willy Pogany's Drawing Lessons / Sketchbook / Mother Goose

OTHER CLASSIC ILLUSTRATORS: Maxfield Parrish's Arabian Nights (1909) / N. C. Wyeth's Legends of Charlemagne / Mabel Lucie Attwell's Peter Pan and Wendy / Frank Reynolds Paints Pickwick / W. Lee Hankey's Quiet Village Part One and Part Two / Monks By Eduard von Grutzner

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MODERN ILLUSTRATION


From the 1920s through the late 1950s, magazines featured the work of some of the top talents in the art world. Leindecker, Artzybasheff, Szyk and Hurst were all great artists whose work has a lot to offer today's cartoonists and character designers. Thanks to Archive Supporters Mike Fontanelli and Kent Butterworth, we've been able to bring many of these great names to your attention.

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BORIS ARTZYBASHEFF: As I See: Neurotica, Machinalia and Diablerie

LAWSON WOOD: The Monkey Painter Part One and Part Two

WARTIME PROPAGANDA: Arthur Szyk: The New Order / WWI Propaganda Posters / WWII Propaganda Posters

COLLIERS MAGAZINE: Mid-1930s Illustrations and Advertisements / WWII Era Illustrations / Late 40s Illustrations

CORONET MAGAZINE: Bugs Bunny: A Hare Grows In Manhattan 1945 / Disney's Casey At The Bat / Harper Goff's Blood On The Moon

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GOLDEN BOOK STYLE


Thanks to a generous donation by Archive Supporter John Kricfalusi, we are able to share the beautiful work of the great artists who made a fortune for Western Publishing's Little Golden Book line. The style was created by Disney concept artist, Gustaf Tenggren and reached its peak in books by Mel Crawford. Many animation artists moonlighted as children's book illustrators... among them Norm McCabe, Harvey Eisenberg, Mary Blair and J. P. Miller.

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GUSTAF TENGGREN: Tenggren's Tell It Again Book Part One and Part Two / Sing for Christmas / The Little Trapper (See also Gustaf Tenggren under Classic Illustration above.)

FEODOR ROJANKOVSKY: Frog Went A-Courtin'

TIBOR GERGELY: A Day In The Jungle

MARY BLAIR: Mary Blair's Baby's House / Little Verses Part One and Part Two / The New Golden Song Book Part One, Part Two and Part Three

MEL CRAWFORD: Rootie Kazootie Joins The Circus

AL WHITE: Rocky & His Friends / Huck Hound Builds A House

DISNEY: Early 50s Disney Christmas Cards / Disney's Uncle Remus Stories Part One and Part Two

RECORD ALBUMS: 50s & 60s LP Covers Part One and Part Two / Bozo And His Rocket Ship

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PLAYBOY CARTOONISTS


In the 1950s and 60s, Playboy magazine employed many of the most talented cartoonists of the day. There's a lot to learn from these beautiful and deceptively simple cartoons. Many of them are models of color harmony, composition and staging. There's also a wide variety of styles, from the fast watercolor washes of Eldon Dedini to the carefully rendered airbrush work of Alberto Vargas. Style is something sadly lacking in a lot of cartooning today. These cartoons have style in abundance.

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ERICH SOKOL: Early Sokol Cartoons / More Erich Sokol / A Passel of Sokol

ELDON DEDINI: Introducing Dedini / Satyrs & Nymphs / Dedini in the Swingin' 60s

HARVEY KURTZMAN & WILL ELDER: Little Annie Fanny Part One, Part Two and Part Three

OTHER PLAYBOY CARTOONISTS: Jack Cole And More Great 50s Playboy Cartoonists / A Jack Cole Valentine / Meet Doug Sneyd / Doug Sneyd - Phil Interlandi / More Phil Interlandi Playboy Cartoons

PINUP ARTISTS: Alberto Vargas / George Petty's Ridgid Tools Calendars and the 1947 Petty Girl Calendar / John Held Jr's Flappers
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Illustration: Willy Pogany's Mother Goose

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see reason number 3 on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great posts about children's book illustrators.


One of my favorite blogs is David Apatoff's Illustration Art. David is one of the best writers on the subject of art that I've read online. He's unique because he thinks like an artist and he's concise, two characteristics that are rare when it comes to art criticism in the blogosphere.

The other day, David posted about one of my favorite illustrators, Willy Pogany. (Read his post HERE.) You might recall that we featured Pogany on the Archive site twice last Summer... (Willy Pogany's Drawing Lessons and Pogany's Sketchbook) The post on Illustration Art discusses how much better Pogany's work was when it was less embellished and more direct. I couldn't agree more. I would add that it's even better when it doesn't take itself quite so seriously. A perfect example of Pogany at his absolute peak is a book that just happens to be my favorite illustrated children's book, Willy Pogany's Mother Goose.

I'm afraid that viewing this book on the web puts you at a distinct disadvantage. This is one of those books that expresses itself beyond just the images. The size and weight of the book, the feel of the paper, the proportion of text blocks and margins, and the counterpoint in the layout of opposing pages all contribute to the powerful impression this book makes on the reader. The best way I can describe the feeling of reading this book is that each turn of the page is like revealing a new surprise.

From a design standpoint this book was revolutionary, because in 1928 when it was first published, the norm for illustrated books was to have uniform text blocks filling the bulk of the pages with an occasional hand tipped and tissue protected color plate. Pogany breaks all those conventions and makes every single page a fully illuminated illustration. I think it could be argued that this is one of the very first modern children's books. The watercolors are rendered quickly in a deceptively simple style, but they're packed with a million clever design ideas and tremendous spontaneity.

I'm afraid this is one book that I can't afford a clean first edition copy of. The copy I scanned was battered and worn. I've done extensive Photoshopping to remove smudges and creases from the many decades of abuse by tiny fingers, and I've done my best to maintain the relative scale and basic compositions of the page spreads. I hope you enjoy this book as much as I do.















Let me know in the comments if you'd like to see more from this book.

If you would like to find out more about Willy Pogany, see... Life Drawing: Willy Pogany's Drawing Lessons and Pogany's Sketchbook

See also... Milo Winter's Aesop For Children, Lorioux's Fables De La Fontaine Part One and Part Two, Felix Lorioux's Tom Thumb, Puss in Boots, Fables De La Fontaine Part One and Part Two, Le Buffon des Enfants, Mabel Lucie Attwell's Peter Pan and Wendy, Einar Norelius' Bland Tomtar Och Troll 1929 and 1934, John Bauer's Bland Tomtar Och Troll 1917, More Norelius and Bauer, Arthur Rackham's Grimm's Fairy Tales Part One and Part Two, Kay Nielsen's East of the Sun and West of the Moon and Hansel & Gretel, Dulac's H.C. Andersen Part One and Part Two, Little Verses Part One and Part Two, and Rojankovsky's Frog Went A-Courtin'.

Thanks
Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive
.

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Illustration: Milo Winter's Aesop For Children

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see reason number 3 on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great posts about children's book illustrators.


Today, I am going to introduce you to another great golden age illustrator, Milo Winter. Born in 1888 in Princeton, Illinois, Winter studied at the Chicago Art Institute. He illustrated dozens of books throughout the teens, twenties and thirties. His better known books are the ones for the Windermere series... Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, The Three Musketeers and Alice in Wonderland. Winter also served as the art director of the Childcraft series in the late 40s and early 1950s. But his greatest work was the oversize books he illustrated for Rand McNally from the late teens like the one we are featuring today.

Winter was a master of animal drawing. Check out the amazing depictions in these pages... anatomically accurate to the last detail, yet still full of personality and life. If you like this book, let me know in the comments. I have lots more from this and other Winter books if you are interested.





















If you enjoyed this article, see also... Lorioux's Fables De La Fontaine Part One and Part Two, Felix Lorioux's Tom Thumb, Puss in Boots, Fables De La Fontaine Part One and Part Two, Le Buffon des Enfants, Mabel Lucie Attwell's Peter Pan and Wendy, Einar Norelius' Bland Tomtar Och Troll 1929 and 1934, John Bauer's Bland Tomtar Och Troll 1917, More Norelius and Bauer, Arthur Rackham's Grimm's Fairy Tales Part One and Part Two, Kay Nielsen's East of the Sun and West of the Moon and Hansel & Gretel, Dulac's H.C. Andersen Part One and Part Two, Little Verses Part One and Part Two, and Rojankovsky's Frog Went A-Courtin'.

Thanks
Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive
.

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Illustration: The Genesis of the Golden Book Style

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.


If you are a fan of the Golden Book style, you'll be very interested in today's post. They say a picture is worth a thousand words... Well, using a few pictures and fewer words, I'm going to show you how Gustaf Tenggren developed the Golden Book style for the first time and what inspired him to create it.

If you haven't seen my previous post on Tenggren's Tell It Again Book, take a look at it before you read this one. It will fill you in on the back-story of Tenggren's unhappy experience working at the Disney Studios and how he resolved himself to reinvent his style to suit a new market for children's book illustration. Tenggren was searching for a way to simplify and streamline his style. You can see his experiments with stylization and more basic rendering techniques in these examples...








For inspiration, Tenggen goes all the way back to his roots... the work of his mentor, John Bauer. Here is one of Tenggren's illustrations...


And here is one by Bauer from the Swedish Christmas annual, Bland Tomtar Och Troll...


He also appears to be familiar with the work of his successor on the Bland Tomtar Och Troll series, Einar Norelius. Here is Tenggren...


And here is Norelius...


But halfway through Tenggren's Tell It Again Book comes a huge breakthrough in design. Instead of the full page plates, Tenggren begins to float his characters over the white of the page, wrapping the text around the compositions. Background elements are reduced to small islands on the page, rather than extending out to the edges of a square bounding box. When I first got this book, I wondered why Tenggren had changed format halfway through. Clearly one reason was to save time and streamline the work of producing so many illustrations for a single book. But there was an aesthetic precedent to it as well. The answer has been hanging on my bedroom wall since I was a little boy!

Like Tenggren, my Grandmother was Swedish. In the early 1920s, she took my father to Sweden to visit his Grandparents. It was the only time he was able to meet them, since he lived in Peterborough, Canada, a very long sea voyage away from their farm in Goteborg, Sweden. My great grandparents gave my father a gift to take home with him to remind him of the visit- this Swedish folk art picture...


When I was born, my father gave it to me to hang in my bedroom, and it's been there ever since. Notice the similarity between the forward pitched perspective, the staging of the characters in clear profile silhouettes, and the simple rendering of the figures over the white of the paper on this print and the Tenggren illustrations that follow...










Tenggren had discovered a way to simplify and refine his illustrations even further. Instead of busy backgrounds full of details, he used just enough information to place the characters, and focused his attention on composing the figures. Immediately after publishing this book, Tenggren produced The Poky Little Puppy, the book that was the model for the hundreds of Little Golden Books that followed over the next seventy years. By going back to his roots and synthesizing his Swedish cultural upbringing, Tenggren invented a style that now seems to us to be quintessentially American.

This is a perfect example of how immigrant artists of all kinds suited their artistic voice to their new lives in the United States in the first half of the 20th century. Carlo Vinci's Italian heritage resulted in a superhero mouse who sang opera. Bill Tytla's Eastern European roots helped him create a monster in Fantasia. And Milt Gross' Jewish upbringing expressed itself in comic celebrations of the ethnic vitality of New York City.

The melting pot of American culture sure is rich with cartoons!

For more incredible illustration by Gustaf Tenggren, see... Tenggren's Tell It Again Book Part One, D'Aulnoy Fairy Tales and The Good Dog Book, Tenggren's Grimms Fairy Tales Part One and Part Two, Heidi, Wonderbook and Juan & Juanita, Sing For Christmas, and Small Fry and the Winged Horse.

See also... Einar Norelius' Bland Tomtar Och Troll 1929 and 1934, John Bauer's Bland Tomtar Och Troll 1917, More Norelius and Bauer, Arthur Rackham's Grimm's Fairy Tales Part One and Part Two, Kay Nielsen's East of the Sun and West of the Moon and Hansel & Gretel, Dulac's H.C. Andersen Part One and Part Two.

Thanks
Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive
.

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Illustration: Mabel Lucie Attwell's Peter Pan and Wendy

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see reason number 3 on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great posts about children's book illustrators.


There often seems to be a disconnect between the illustrators Walt Disney hired to do inspirational artwork for his films and the designs he actually ended up using. On Snow White, Disney hired the amazing painter, Gustaf Tenggren; but his instructions to him were to paint in the style of Arthur Rackham. For Peter Pan, he hired the illustrator David Hall, but the film itself doesn't resemble his work at all. Instead, it seems to be a "Disneyfication" of Mabel Lucie Attwell's illustrations for the 1921 edition of J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan & Wendy.

Attwell was born in 1879 and received some education at the Regent School of Art and Heatherley's School of Art in London, but she grew bored with her academic studies and dropped out to focus on her own interests... painting cherubic children and fairies. Her work wasn't very warmly received at first by galleries and agents, but when her first batch of paintings sold out in three days, they became much more enthusiastic. Attwell illustrated greeting cards and children's books, the most famous of which we are featuring today, Peter Pan & Wendy.

Disney didn't appropriate Attwell's baby faced characters, but he did use some of the same details of costume and setting, and placed the emphasis of his visual storytelling on many of the same elements. Attwell's designs lean a bit too heavily on formula, but there is a distinctive delicate appeal to her style. Enjoy.














Please let me know in the comments if you found this post to be useful.

If you enjoyed this article, see also... Little Verses Part One and Part Two and The New Golden Song Book Part One, Part Two and Part Three, Felix Lorioux's Tom Thumb, Puss in Boots, Fables De La Fontaine Part One and Part Two, Le Buffon des Enfants, Rojankovsky's Frog Went A-Courtin', Tibor Gergely's A Day In The Jungle, Gustaf Tenggren's The Little Trapper, Uncle Remus Stories Part One and Part Two.

Thanks
Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive
.

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Illustration: Wartime Colliers Magazine

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for more jaw dropping images from classic illustrated books and magazines.


Thanks to Archive supporters Kent Butterworth and Mike Fontanelli, our database includes many great examples of classic illustration from the pages of the "Rolls Royce" of weekly publications, Colliers magazine. In the past, we've covered mid 30s Colliers illustrations, mid 30s advertisements, and late 40s Colliers illustrations. Today, we turn our attention to a very interesting time in American history, WWII. The war effort permeated everyday life throughout the nation, from the richest person all the way down to the poorest. This magazine reflects that, with feature stories, illustrations and ads that all reflect wartime themes. (For more on WWII, see Walt's War, Wartime Propaganda, Dispatch From Disney's and Artzybasheff's Diablerie.)