Walt Stanchfield’s “Drawn To Life”

For twenty years Walt Stanchfield was a drawing instructor at Disney, teaching and inspiring some of the worlds’ best artists and animators to help them hone their craft. He often gave his students handouts filled with inspiring sketches and valuable insights into the process of gesture drawing. The handouts were so popular that they were [...]

Shameless Plug: Recommended Resources

It’s been a while so I thought I’d take a minute to shamelessly plug my website store. I plug a lot of stuff so there should be something of interest to everyone.
First, you can download The Best of Head Hunting, a PDF containing over 100 of the best portrait and cartoon sketches from my two [...]

Give Your Poses Clarity and Interest

I have a confession to make: Lately I’ve been getting lazy in my drawings. When designing a character I’ve been so focused on the overall design that I’ve completely neglected the importance of good posing. My designs have been improving in recent months but my characters wind up mostly just standing around (at least in [...]

Artists On YouTube

Here’s a few YouTube videos I’ve stumbled upon recently from some artists whose work I admire:
Dennis Jones is a phenominal illustrator. He draws very fun, entertaining cartoon characters and then paints them with a master’s eye for color and shading. Here’s a quick demo of him painting in Photoshop. View Dennis’ YouTube channel for more [...]

Kyle Baker’s “How To Draw Stupid”

I recently ordered a copy of Kyle Baker’s new book How To Draw Stupid and Other Essentials of Cartooning (Amazon.com link). For those of you who aren’t familiar with Baker’s work, he’s a prolific cartoonist with a background in comic books and animation. His work has appeared in numerous publications including BusinessWeek, Entertainment Weekly, The [...]

More Pixar: Spline Doctors, “Presto”

Following up on my last post, here’s two more inspiring links related to Pixar:

The first is a Presto, the new animated short that is shown before Wall•E in the theaters and will no doubt be included on the DVD. It’s a zany little film animated in a style inspired by the classic Warner Brothers shorts. [...]

New Animation Book From Eric Goldberg

Many animation fans will recognize the name Eric Goldberg. He’s an accomplished animator and director with a long list of credits in advertising, television, and feature films. He is best known for animating the Genie in Disney’s Alladin and for directing Pocahontas, and is one of the “top-drawer” animators currently working in the biz.
Goldberg has [...]

Animation Notes From Ollie Johnston and John Lasseter

The passing of legendary Disney animator Ollie Johnston has stirred a lot of emotion, memories, and discussion among animators and animation fans. In that spirit fellow Minnesotan Robbie Halvorson sent me a link to some of Ollie’s notes on animation. The notes came from Disney animator G. Scott Owen Pixar’s John Lasseter, who writes:
When I [...]

Disney Legend Ollie Johnston Passes Away

Animation legend Ollie Johnston, the last surviving member of Walt Disney’s famous “Nine Old Men”, passed away yesterday (April 14, 2008). He was 95.
Johnston was a phenomenal artist and widely regarded as one of the world’s greatest animators. In 1935 he was hired to work at the Disney studio alongside his pal Frank Thomas. They [...]

Re-Post: Free Drawing Lessons

Here’s an old blog post from 2005. My blog audience has grown since then so I thought it was worth re-posting:

(Sketches by Pixar artist Tom Gately)
Walt Stanchfield started as a Disney clean-up artist in the 60’s, and by the 1990’s he had become one of Disney’s premiere drawing instructors. Now, thanks to the folks at [...]