Happy Birthday Annette!

Annette Funicello, October 22, 1942 – April 8, 2013

Mary Poppins

This was my favorite film growing up and still ranks in my top five.

Disney's Mineral King attraction poster

I created this fake attraction poster, for Mineral King, which was a proposed Ski Resort that Walt Disney wanted to create in California. Development lagged on even after his death and the project ultimately died too. But it's fun to imagine what it would be like if there was a little Disney resort in the Mountains of California.

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...

Glen Keane

Nowadays, it's cliche for someone to name Glen Keane as their favorite animator, however, that has been the case for me since Beauty and the Beast first came out. That's when I first found out who he was and he became the embodiment, to me, of Disney Animation. I received the signed photo below, along with a letter, in response to a very gushy fan letter I sent to him when I was about 14.

This past weekend Mr. Keane announced his resignation from Disney after 38 years. Rather than feel sad, I'm excited that he's moving on, most likely to continue to animate and do what he loves, instead of floundering in a job that no longer seems to have a use for him anymore. I only met him once, but I wish him well.

I hope he starts a blog...

Rough Magic

A few years back, I was asked to design the header/logo for MagicMusic.net, a discussion forum about Disney music. What was really exciting was that the webmaster is a big fan of Kevin Kidney and Jody Daily's as I am, and he wanted something similar to what they had designed for LuxuriaMusic.com

Designed by Kevin & Jody

I was super excited about this, loving both Disney music and Kevin and Jody's work. The client wanted the logo to have a retro 50's feel, but was open to maybe showing a progression of the early days of records up through modern digital formats. Other suggestions were to use Disney icons (Sorcerer's hats and wands) without infringing on copyright. Unfortunately, the webmaster decided to go another direction and not use my stuff. Here are my rough pencil/computer text mockups.

I may just finish a few of these some day, just because I like them so much. All designs are copyright Eric Scales unless otherwise stated.

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.

The Super Big Micro Show

No sooner do I try to take a week off than I get the opportunity to do a little promo for an exciting event. A good friend of mine, Disney artist Brian Kesinger, started a blog some time ago. I've been a bit too busy to give it the sort of shout out it deserves, but suffice it to say his work is incredible. Brian has worked at Walt Disney Feature Animation for 13 years now, contributing Layouts to films like Tarzan, Prep and Landing, Chicken Little, Bolt, and serving on the story crew of the upcoming Winnie the Pooh. Though working at Disney would be a dream come true for many people, the realities of production deadlines means that even if you draw cartoons for a living you still need ways to blow off a little creative steam. Brian and several of his fellow artists got together and created what they dubbed the Micro Gallery. It's literally a narrow section of corridor at the end of the hall where they can display their own artwork. Recently, Gallery Nucleus decided to showcase the work of the micro gallery and expand it to showcase artists from Dreamworks, Pixar, and other neighborhood studios. It's always amazing to see the artwork that an artist does outside of work, and Gallery Nucleus' Super Big Micro Show is an opportunity to do just that. The opening reception is on December 11 at 7pm and the show will run until Jan 4. If you'd like to see what kind of artwork today's animation artists do "just for fun" stop by Gallery Nucleus!

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.