Disney Copies, Vol. 1

Donald Duck is one of the greatest cartoon characters ever, and my personal favorite of the classic Disney characters. So, as you can imagine, I prepped to construct him myself. Strictly for practice, of course.
Those two sketches are taken from frames in the 1951 short, 'Lucky Number'.

This is Donald as seen on a 1930s model sheet. Pretty vague, but this next one has a clear origin...
This is Donald as seen on the poster for the 1943 short, 'Donald's Tire Trouble'.

This is a Donald pose from the theatrical poster of the 1945 classic (by my watch) musical, 'The Three Caballeros'.
Here's a frame of Fred Moore's animation right from the film. Though I drew it off of a rough drawing out of 'Illusion of Life'.

And how about another pose taken from 'Illusion of Life'?

I'll wrap this up with a pose right out of the 1938 short, 'Donald's Golf Game'.

The 'Illusion of Life' text: that's a good place to look for top-notch drawings to construct from.

'Pinnochio' Copies 1

Here we go: the series of sketches I broadly hinted at.

'Pinnochio' is such a sacred animated film, with incredible drawings and characters, that I just had to practice cartoon construction with it.Again, here's Norm Ferguson's (with John Lounsbury) Honest John, from the sequence where he and Gideon are meeting with the Coachman. He's saying the line, "And who do we have to eh, 'slices across throat'"

Then, I went over to a beat from the Pleasure Island sequence. It's where Ward Kimball's Jiminy Cricket is at his huffiest.

"And what am I?"

"Just your conscience"

"Well, that settles it!"

Hope you all got your copies of the Platinum Edition of this. I primarily used it for the frames to draw off of.

New material

Whoops. I should have updated again by now.

Wells, for anyone checking in, I have some new drawings. These are based on frames from, get this, the 1980s opus, 'The Chipmunk Adventure'. They're taken from 'The Boys and Girls of Rock and Roll' sequence.

Now, why draw from a film like this? Well, the animation in it is actually really good. It goes without saying that the bulk of animation was done by some top Disney animators (in a stint after 'The Black Cauldron' made for some pesky layoffs.)

I'd say that these aren't perfect, but a start. Look closely at the actual sequence, and my drawings are a wee off in terms of spacing. These chipmunks are hard to draw. I will do some more of these soon enough: they look great.

Soon, I want to get underway "copying" frames of Ward Kimball animation from 'Pinnochio'. His Cricket drawings, among others, are stunning.

Prepare for Phase 1

Based on a recent postage on the mother of all cartoon blogs (JohnKStuff), I've learned that Johnny Hart's sketchy but humorous caveman makes for a test in cartoon construction.

This is the original:

And here's my first pass at mimicing his material:

Second pass...And third pass... Granted, the one big problem area is those pesky, dirty feet...eewww. But I think that the third image comes closest to looking like the original.

The trick in construction here appears to be in spacing, angles, and in volumes. It's all about the circles.

How would you construct a pair of legs like these?