23 Days of Halloween: Day 2- Ghost Acrobat

In preparing a bunch of drawings for this month of Halloween sketches, I started thinking about Marc Davis' countless drawings of ghosts for Disneyland's Haunted Mansion. So many of his ghosts were really just people going about their daily lives, after they'd died! I thought I'd come up with some ghosts, enjoying their chosen professions in the afterlife. I started alphabetically. So here's a Ghost Acrobat.

Project Omni

A little while ago, I wrote an atypically cryptic blog post about the 1960's and sci-fi stuff like miniaturization and molecules and things. And I showed a picture of a logo I had designed. Remember? Well that logo was just a small part of a short film that my friend Roby Brown at Windup JetPack  was working on. He wanted to create a Preshow Film for the classic Disneyland attraction Adventure Thru Inner Space which operated from 1967 until 1985.  If you were fortunate enough to ride that attraction, you'll remember that while you got a lot of information waiting to board your "atommobile", there was no Preshow Film persay- Roby, like all good creative people saw this absence and saw it as an opportunity to make something. It's an awesome little film and I'm happy he asked me to help. Check it out below.




Makes you want to don mouse ears and hop in line to get miniaturized doesn't it? Or at least to dust off the old chemistry set.

Before you do though, here are just a few of the various versions of the logo I designed for ATOM, the Association To Optimize Miniaturization. I love 60's styling, so it was fun to design the corporate logo for this fictional firm.

Approaching Adventure

The 1960's: a decade of unprecedented technological advancement. Despite the chaos of the times, American industry kept a hopeful eye on the goal of the moon, and further, on outer space. But what if instead of trying to reach the moon, those industries had turned their efforts inward. Not to the stars, but towards the very molecules that composed our world.

One company did.

Association To Optimize Miniaturization

Coming Soon...

Amigos! Amigos!

Another Odosketch for you today. This one owes it's inspiration to the great Barker Bird replica created by Kevin Kidney and Jody Daily a few years ago. Still my favorite piece of Disneyland Merchandise EVER created. Love having his colorful form brightening up my desk.

Click HERE to watch it being drawn full size.

Yeah, we wrote these lousy lyrics...

Wendell is one example of a final Animatronic figure (below) that I don't think matched the Marc Davis art very closely. The face matches, but to me, the Marc Davis art shows a stockier Wendell, while the Animatronic seem's slenderer especially around the neck, which to me changes the whole look of the face. I tried to match the art exactly, except that I gave my sculpture the mandolin of the final figure as opposed to the banjo that Davis drew him with.

I wasn't entirely happy with his face; like Henry there were some big symmetry problems. I was happy with how well I was able to match the posture of Davis' art- that arched back as Wendell hits some horrible off key note. This was the last Country Bear I sculpted. Like I mentioned on a previous post, each bear got a bit bigger each time. Wendell wasn't bigger than Trixie, but he was bigger in scale than he should have been. I figured it was time to take a break before I did another, perhaps find one from this set that I was happy with and then redo the others and new ones to match that scale. But as it happens, life gets in the way. I'd love to get back to this project some day though. And of course then there's America Sings...

Tears will be the chaser for her wine

This was the first one where I really relied on the Marc Davis artwork. Even though Trixie is basically a big lump, the way her arms are postitioned and the subtle tilt of her head are perfect here, and something that would go unnoticed on the actual Animatronics figure. The main thing I changed was the position of her feet, cause I liked the way the Animatronic kind of rocked back and forth on her box and kicked her feet a bit. Like I said, this is my favorite of the 4 that I did. Don't know why, there's just something about it I really like.

The End

Until tomorrow's entry that is.

Howdy Folks!

The second Country Bear I tried to sculpt was Henry, the host of the show. Like Big Al, I relied a bit more on photos than the Marc Davis art for this one. Specifically, I noticed that Henry has a particular posture I wanted to capture, kind of leaning forward on his seat. The animatronic figure also has a very well defined shape, as opposed to some of the others which tend to kind of be furry lumps. I got the body shape pretty well, though the face has some symmetry problems, little stuff that wasn't really noticeable until I had finally painted it. The most frustrating thing though is that his scale is out of proportion with Big Al's. In fact each subsequent Bear I did was bigger than the last. I think this was an unfortunate effect of putting more and more care into each figure- the more detail I added, the more clay it took to achieve and in my enthusiasm I wasn't paying attention to the sizes. I meant to remedy this and actually made a second Henry, but he met with an unfortunate accident before he could be painted. Oh well. Below are the pictures of the first Henry.

Ya'll come back tomorrow for that special treat out of Tampa. A little bit of ever loving cuddlesome fluff, our own Trixie! She's the one I'm most proud of. See ya'll real soon!

There... was... BLOOD on the saddle....

About 8 years ago I decided that I wanted to try sculpting the characters from the Country Bear Jamboree. How hard could that be? Mind you I had no real sculpting experience, just a class or two in high school, and when I say class, I mean there was an hour where they let me play with some clay and simple tools- instruction was really not part of the process. Anyway, I had always loved seeing pictures of small maquettes and the beautifully sculpted larger than life characters in this Disneyland attraction seemed like the perfect subject to try my hand at.

The first one I decided to tackle was Big Al. For reference I used the above piece of Marc Davis art and lots of photos of the final Audio-Animatronics figure. All I used was some simple white clay that I bought at a craft store, toothpicks to sculpt some of the smaller details and acrylic craft paint.

I was so happy with this sculpture- like all art, it's just so satisfying to take something that's just an idea in your head and see it through, in this case to a fully dimensional object. In retrospect, it's far from perfect. I sculpted the way I painted back then- I was more about the overall impression than the fine details, so things are lumpy and rough and not as refined as they could be. But the overall sculpture had the pose and personality that I liked- and keep in mind he's just under 3 inches tall. What's even better is that as I did each subsequent bear they got bigger and bigger, so Big Al ironically ended up being the smallest. Stay tuned and I'll post the 3 other Country Bears that I sculpted. See you real soon!

Tom Sawyer's Space Mountain

I took this picture a few weeks ago. I went over to Tom Sawyer Island to take some pictures before it began it's transformation into "Pirates Island". I just thought that this was a cool view. Thematically, Space Mountain is about as far from Tom Sawyers Island as you can get, but ironically it's easily seen from this one angle. I think Space Mountain is an absolutely beutiful building, though I've long taken it for granted. This sort of picture makes me want to go find what other lands you can see it from.