BAMBI pan background

Tonight, once again I found nirvana in recreating this gorgeous pan background piece from BAMBI. There is a sublime tranquility in this artwork. No pop art colors. It is a gentle palette... creating a beautiful landscape for Bambi's first walk to the meadow.

This artwork is a perfect example of why I revere the art and artists from early Disney.

As usual I have split the pan so you can click on right and left sections to see greater detail.

BAMBI Winter Pan B/G

The complete re-assembled pan B/G:

Left side detail:

Right side detail:

more from BAMBI

I was able to remove all but three baby birds from this B/G...




The first frame of this segment is on the left as Bambi jumps into the scene... I was able to expand the B/G art the length of this pan...

The Real Bambi & Thumper!

As an animal lover, I was absolutely knocked out by a set of photographs that show us the "real Bambi & Thumper!"

The entire series was shot by photographer Tanja Askani. You can see them on her website:

http://www.tanja-askani.de/info/?p=18

Enjoy!

BAMBI pan background

Here is a digitally recreated pan background from BAMBI. I have also included larger versions of the left and right sides so you can get a really good look at the detail. Gorgeous work!

BAMBI (1942)

Thanks again to overseas correspondents Pete Turner from England and Andrea Giglio from Italy, for their recent contributions to this blog. The posting of these wonderful recreated backgrounds from BAMBI are made possible by their digital handiwork and generosity.

BAMBI (Thumper Background)

In December 2007 I was fortunate to acquire a cel of THUMPER from BAMBI. This little guy is such a charmer!

The cel was released in the 1940s through the Courvoisier Gallery program. It has the official WDP stamp in the lower right corner (Walt Disney Productions).

As was the practice at the time, the cel is laminated.

As a later Courvoisier release, it has a typically uninspired background. The early Courvoisier backgrounds were actually created by artists at Disney Studios and were more elaborate. Later releases like this one were prepared by art students in the San Francisco area, where Courvoisier was located.

The original moment in the movie included Thumper's family and looked like this:

I digitally re-created the entire original pan background:

While I was in Photoshop, I sized and then overlaid the Thumper image in exactly the right position on the recreated pan B/G to see what the setup would look like. Here's the result:

BAMBI

Here's a gorgeous digitally reconstructed pan B/G fro BAMBI:

Left side detail:

Right side detail:

Here's more, single frame size, very lovely:

In Praise of Real Paint!

Since I've been extolling the virtues of using real paint on illustration board, I thought this might be a good opportunity to show some samples of the art I've done for various Disney books over the years. These are all painted with gouache, an opaque form of watercolours.



As I've often mentioned in previous posts, "The Jungle Book" remains my alltime favourite of the Disney animated features. Therefore, it was a real treat to illustrate this book for Random House, which was just a simple retelling of the story targeted to beginning readers. It was one of a series of books under the umbrella title of "My First Disney Story". I drew and painted four of these books and did the pencilling for a fifth that was painted by another illustrator. I am quite comfortable using gouache, and endeavor to paint the backgrounds fairly close to what they look like in the original films.

Painting the characters in these illustrations is a bit tricky, and I always start by masking them out with frisket so as to keep the characters untouched as I paint the background behind them. That way, the characters are still just my pencil lines on clean white areas of board when I go to paint them in. As you can see, I keep the tonal rendering on the characters to a minimum, so they don't start looking all shiny like plastic. (I don't like the Disney video box art for that very reason.) I find that just a bit of dry brush shading on one side gives them the clean, crisp look that I prefer.



These samples from the "Bambi" book I illustrated for that same series unfortunately never saw the light of day. This particular book was sadly never published, as Random House execs were keeping a close watch on sales of the other books and weren't sure how well "Bambi" would do. Though I was still paid well for my work, it was a real disappointment not to see this one in print, as I had really enjoyed doing these paintings. In addition to these two titles, I also illustrated two others in the series on "The Lion King" and "Snow White", as well as having pencilled the illustrations for a "Dumbo" book.

This was at a time when Disney Consumer Products was still greenlighting lots of fun projects, utilizing characters from many of their classic films. Sadly, the mindset there is far different now, with book product limited pretty much to just the "Disney Princesses" franchise and "Winnie-the-Pooh". The only other films that still get some book tie-in seem to be the Pixar titles. Frankly, I miss the days when Disney was still celebrating their classics of the past, as these were the characters that I was happiest to work with. I wish that the folks at Consumer Products would realize just how big an audience still exists for those classic animated films. Additionally, it would be nice if Mickey and the gang would start to be used again properly, instead of relegated to just that preschool "Mickey's Clubhouse" with its unfortunate computer generated animation...