Dan Haskett

One of the benefits of working in an animation studio has to be all of the great artwork passed around. Thousands of pages of model sheets, character designs, animation drawings, and naughty pictures from all of the studios, from the 1940's through the present.

I probably spent more time at the copier than at my desk for the first couple months at Warner Bros. It was an overwhelming amount of beautiful artwork but out of all of it I think I got the most inspiration from four sources: Bruce Timm's pin-up drawings, John K.'s "headpiles" Tiny-Toons drawings, and especially the rough sketches of Dan Haskett and Lynne Naylor. The rhythm, flow, life and appeal in Naylor & Haskett's drawings blew my mind, and I knew that was what I wanted to achieve in my own work. I studied those drawings obsessively. Over the years my drawings have improved in many ways, but I feel like I've lost a lot of that animation influence, and I've gone back to those sources recently in hopes of getting back some of that graceful flow.

A few random examples of Haskett's brilliance: