ART Lozzi BG painting textures/ theme park water colors

In my posts on bg paintings, I've mostly been talking about color choices. Good color goes a long way in making your backgrounds appealing- good color is a lot more pleasing and effective than a lot of busy detail.

Now I want to talk a bit about texture and brush technique.

I tell all my painters that every stroke they make should be on purpose and should be done with flair and style. Don't just apply paint and push it around and dab it on sloppily.
Below, the paint is just slapped on. The one attempt at texture is the sloppy, ragged old brushes in the tree.

Use an assortment of surface textures:
Like this above: There is a variety of surface textures in the painting. The tree feels like a different substance than the bush which feels different than the grass.

Many painters use the same types of technique and surface texture to describe all surfaces, regardless of what the substances are made of. They just paint the surfaces "wood color" or "rock color" or "flesh color".

Everything is made out of the same rubber in this still, skin, underwear, buildings. There is only one substance in this universe.

This one too. Here's the blotchy airbrush universe.
The smooth shiny universe:


A good cartoon painter can suggest a variety of surfaces with just a few simple techniques-but it takes his artistic taste and control to apply his brush strokes, sponges and pencil shading with confidence and flair.

THAT TAKES PRACTICE! If you are an aspiring painter or just want to try something maybe new, experiment with your brushes and tools and degree of wet paint to paint strokes with flair- just to get your wrist used to applying good looking strokes and textures.

It's the same way with pencil lines. Some artists might have good solid drawings but their finished drawing suffers from awkward sloppy pencil cleanup. Other artists have great finished stylish lines, but maybe don't have a good drawing underneath (this seems to be the style today). You need both. Good knowledge AND good finish.Tom Oreb here has great drawings and great stylish contrasty finish.

So does Freddy Moore:

Here is crummy drawing and NO finish whatsoever. Nothing at all worth the time of an artist or viewer.

There are many painting styles (like Impressionism) where the brush strokes are not as important as what they add up to when you stand at a distance and see them all blended together.

I happen to like less work and more flair and style. This is especially important in animation, because the paintings are not on screen for a long time, and they aren't usually the focus of attention.

You don't have time to look at tons of detail.

So I say "make your details count".

Your colors and your brush techiques should together convey a feeling that enhances the story or mood of the cartoon.


Art Lozzi and Monteleagre were very good at this and that is why their BGS to this day still look so good and are so much fun.

The general feelings they conveyed were fun, silliness, elegance and style.
Look at the way Art uses sponge on the cave to suggest form and rocky texture. The shapes of the sponge areas help make the cave look rounded.


Art has designed a neat way to graphically paint coniferous needle textures. That texture is different than the sponged on texture of the grass.
Note how Art draws on the umbrella shaped needle textures on the bush. Each stroke is clean and careful, no sloppiness and vagueness.

Hey, here are some neat concept sketches Art did for a theme park in 1969. You can tell he did them fast, yet they are still very pretty colors and loose yet confident brush strokes. These are water color, different than the techniques Art used at HB, but still very nice and still his voice.




I found these at a great site called The Imiaginary World.
http://www.theimaginaryworld.com/page4.html
You could spend days there looking at all the fun retro art, toys, cereal boxes and cool stuff. I have.

Well I Guess I Have To Bribe You

C'mon folks, there must be some of you who like new-fangled web apps.

The one who writes the best explanation of how Raketu and its features - particularly the multi-media, video on demand -podcast type stuff works on Raketu will win a prize.





I'll draw your caricature and add a cartoon character to it.

Scroll down to the last two posts, use Raketu and then describe how it works for you.

If you write it super clearly, you will win! Maybe I'll even hire you.

Your pal,

John

Raketu Universal Instant Messaging

Here're some more of my scribbly "bus-drawing-style" storyboard sketches for Raketu. On cheap-ass crummy paper. Kali witnessed this whole process and will describe to you what happens to my anatomy during the creative act in a comment. ...If you beg her to.The best place to create scribbles is at Roscoe's Chicken and Waffles. It's a soul-food restaurant that has the best fried chicken ever. http://www.roscoeschickenandwaffles.com/
I recommend "The Stubby" and a side of greens. They have the bext textures to squirt out of your mouth as you furiously try to wring your story sketches into life.

I pitched "Man's Best Friend" to Chris Reccardi at Roscoe's and a brother got mad and threw his knife and fork down and started yelling at us "Hey Hey Hey Hey!!! I'm trying to eat here! And you're talking about shitting and eating dog puke! What kind of a show do you call that!!..."
But don't think about that. Think about how cool it would be to get all the gossip from all your friends in one Instant message window.Get Raketu now. It's super easy to download and start and then you can talk to everyone on any IM service.
Think about how cool it would be to get entertaining ads that actually tell you what the product does.
Think about daring innovative companies like Raketu that could sponsor whole cartoons and just add their commercials in them, using my characters to sell their futuristic products.
Think about Sody Pop sitting in her flimsy static-clinging negligee Instant messaging you on a dark lonely night.

UNIVERSAL INSTANT MESSAGING

If you have AIM, then you can't talk to your friends who have MSN or Yahoo, etc. Not without downloading each service and leaving all these windows open at the same time. SCREW THAT! Raketu lets you talk to anyone on any instant message service all at the same time. You just tell Raketu which services you want to be active.

COMBINE ALL YOUR ONLINE APPLICATIONS INTO ONE AND DO MULTIPLE TASKS AT ONCE

Podcasting, multimedia, games, entertainment and more stuff can all be done. To be honest, I haven't used many of these services anyway, but if you do, then you can be useful to the whole world.

So listen. Do me a favor and help me do my job here and you will see more cartoons fast-by the end of January!

DOWNLOAD IT NOW! IT'S FREE AND THE FASTEST DOWNLOAD EVER!

http://www.raketu.com/en/download.php

If you have a PC (which I don't) download Raketu and sign up (don't even pay the 10 bucks yet if you don't need the phone stuff right away, just use all the free stuff) and then post comments telling me what you like best.

I'm gonna put cartoons up on the Raketu that advertise each of these aspects of Raketu so now's your chance to feed me some input!

I'm counting on you to help me get you the cartoons you want....

Raketu Web Page Design and Cartoon Action

So the Raketu ad I did worked out pretty well...well enough that they asked me to design their web page in a similar vein and animate some cartoons. Here's some of my thumbnail boards for it.I met with Greg Parker, the genius rocket scientist who created Raketu and did the programming and he gave me a live demo to show me what Raketu was and what it could do.

His iconoclastic headstrong Irish marketing rebel, Oliver McIntyre and I got together to cook up swell new ways to advertise the product that will be entertaining even while it explains why your world will be much simpler by using Raketu.

Greg's partner, Martina is from a Slavic nation (like me!) and she told me about a really funny cartoon series about a wolf who chain smokes and is creative, who chases a sissy bunny and tries to murder him.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nu,_pogodi!
908/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-8362439-0595360?ie=UTF8&s=dvd

My problem is how to sell a product that does so many things. It seems to coordinate all the activities you do on the internet into one window and program. That's hard to say in an ad! People want to know simple and clear specifics, so we decided to break up the Raketu application into broad main categories.

FREE PHONE SERVICE THROUGH YOUR COMPUTER OR SMART PHONE

The most obvious thing it does is save tons of money in phone bills. For $9.95-as a one time payment, you get to start a Raketu account and then you get to call national and international for nothing in 42 countries. The countries that aren't free are still waay cheaper than any phone company or other VOIP service. So if you get Raketu for nothing else, you will see your phone bills dwindle to just what you pay for your monthly internet bill or your cell phone minimum minutes payment.

These are some of the storyboard sketches I did for a cartoon which brings old George Liquor into the world of the future and saves him a shitload of cash (which is the only way to get him to soften his distrust of anything new!)



You have to get a phone or headphones with microphone to hook up to your computer, then you call thousands of miles away and talk as long as you like.

Raketu is mainly for PC users, not Mac yet and it simplifies your nasty windows within windows torture.

Some other key selling points:

UNIVERSAL INSTANT MESSAGING

If you have AIM, then you can't talk to your friends who have MSN or Yahoo, etc. Not without downloading each service and leaving all these windows open at the same time. SCREW THAT! Raketu lets you talk to anyone on any instant message service all at the same time. You just tell Raketu which services you want to be active.

COMBINE ALL YOUR ONLINE APPLICATIONS INTO ONE AND DO MULTIPLE TASKS AT ONCE

Podcasting, multimedia, games, entertainment and more stuff can all be done. To be honest, I haven't used many of these services anyway, but if you do, then you can be useful to the whole world.

So listen. Do me a favor and help me do my job here and you will see more cartoons fast-by the end of January!

DOWNLOAD IT NOW! IT'S FREE AND THE FASTEST DOWNLOAD EVER!

http://www.raketu.com/en/download.php

If you have a PC (which I don't) download Raketu and sign up (don't even pay the 10 bucks yet if you don't need the phone stuff right away, just use all the free stuff) and then post comments telling me what you like best.

I'm gonna put cartoons up on the Raketu that advertise each of these aspects of Raketu so now's your chance to feed me some input!

I'm counting on you to help me get you the cartoons you want....

Joe Barbera Tribute 1

Joe Barbera and Bill Hanna

When I was about 8 years old and started seriously getting obsessed with animated cartoons, I had 2 favorite studios: Walt Disney and Hanna Barbera.

The motion in Disney seemed completely magical to me, but I didn't really get into the characters. The early Hanna Barbera cartoons intrigued me for the drawing style and that the characters seemed real-which was largely due to Ed Benedict's designs and the great voice work of Daws Butler, Don Messick and Mel Blanc and others.

It was very hard to find any written information about how cartoons were made in 1963 or who made them. I had an article in The Books Of Knowledge that talked about Walt Disney, but the only info I had about Hanna Barbera was the back of a record cover that had a paragraph on each of the partners.

I taught myself to draw by watching the cartoons and drawing as fast as I can. I then bought all the comic books and coloring books and used the grid method to get the basic proportions of the characters. I mostly drew HB characters, but I also drew everyone else's-even Tom and Jerry, whose cartoons I had never seen.

Well I memorized how to draw Huck, Yogi, the Flintstones, The Jetsons, Quick Draw McGraw and I used to draw my own comic stories of them.

By the time I was a teenager and trying to be cool and stuff, I STILL drew the characters only now, I drew dirty drawings of them and developed a caricatured style of drawing them. This ability kept me popular with the football team who I would amuse with my "Cave Nudes" and other wacky cartoon stories and filthy flip books. It kept me from being beat up for being a wimpy cartoonist.

By this time though, Hanna Barbera's cartoons had gone to shit. Scooby Doo was the dominant style, a style lifted from Filmation's cheaper uglier Archie cartoons. I couldn't figure out why HB had abandoned their earlier appealing style for something so purposely ugly. Even the voices were terrible by this time. I found out later by working at Hanna Barbera and eventually talking to Joe and Bill themselves.

http://www.animationarchive.org/2006/04/biography-john-k-interviews-bill-joe.html
http://www.animationarchive.org/2006/05/biography-john-k-interviews-bill-joe.html


In 1984, after working on horrible and typically depressing 80s cartoons for 4 years, I heard that Hanna Barbera was going to revive the Jetsons and I desperately wanted to work on something fun. I'm not able to work on ugly bland cartoons without getting severely depressed. I don't know how so many people do it.

I had just finished a stint as a designer for Dic's Heathcliff cartoons. This had been my best job so far, because I didn't have to do storyboards from bad scripts or layouts from bad storyboards. It was my first character design job and they gave me a lot of freedom to draw characters as cute and funny as I was then capable. I did about 7 shows a week then with Bruce Timm, Jim Gomez as my clean up artists and Lynne Naylor designing some of the characters with me.

So as soon as I heard about HB reviving the Jetsons, I raced over there to apply to be the character designer. I got an interview with the head of the incidental character design department - Bob Singer. Bob was a decent guy, a reasonable draftsman, but extremely conservative and with no design ability whatsoever. His natural design style is the cop and mailman characters you see in Scooby Doo and other 70s HB cartoons-REALLY BLAND. Bob was an enemy of style and cartooniness. He hated it!

I drew up a big stack of sample Jetsons style characters to show him and he looked through them with much attention and was mildly impressed. He said, "Well you seem to have a knack for this old UPA-ish style, but you are tending to overdo the flatness and designiness of that period. The Jetsons aren't actually flat. They are 3 dimensional.

Tell you what, Bill and Joe are not happy with the development sketches on the New Jetsons and I have a couple trainee designers who are struggling with the style and don't quite get it.

I'll give you a test. If you work in house on The Smurfs as a designer for awhile, then we'll see how you do and I'll consider showing your stuff to the bosses."

AAAARGH!

torture.

So I had to sit in an office next to the two kids who were "struggling" with Jetsons characters and listen to them complain about how hard it is to draw Ed Benedict's style while I suffered under the cruel blandness of the Smurfs and Gerard Baldwin and his team of moronic evil writers. These two Einsteins would come in and tell me how envious they were of my job on The Smurfs.

A month or two went by as I got more and more depressed, and the whole time I would hear rumors that the show's producer Alex Lovy and Bill and Joe themselves were rejecting everything that the design department was doing.

Finally, I guess Singer must have been taking some heat, so he came to me and said "OK, John I'll give you your chance. Here, take home these character descriptions for an episode of the Jetsons and then design them the best you can." I did them that night and brought them in to Bob the next day and then he looked at them with disapproval and told me that they were still too flat and designy There was no way he could show them to Bill and Joe or Alex. But I could still work on the Smurfs if I wanted to.

That was one black day in my early career. I was just dying to barge into Joe's office to see for myself whether he thought I could do it or not. Instead I made up my mind to quit. I couldn't stand another day of the Smurfs and listening to the toddlers in the next room deciding that Superman was easier to animate than Fred Flintstone, because Superman was more 3 dimensional.

Well, I figured, I'll take a chance. Maybe I'll get blackballed for going over Singer's head, but I was just DYING to work on a real cartoon, so I marched over to the executive building of HB and was walking down the hall hoping to run into Bill or Joe, when I bumped into Alex Lovy. He's the Walter Lantz director and storyboard artist, who was going to produce the new Jetsons.

I was clutching my huge stack of Jetsons samples and was nervous as Hell but I blurted out, "Mr. Lovy! You don't know me, but I'm a big fan of yours! I love Woody Woodpecker and I know you are producing the Jetsons and I'm dying to work for you!"

Alex was real nice and invited me into his room and said "Let's see what you got , son!"

He started flipping through the drawings and his eyes lit up and he said, "Hey kid! This is just what we're looking for! You got this old style down! Let's go see if Joe is in his office!"

Alex whisked me down the hall and knocked on the door to Joe's office. Joe opened the door and there he was! I was looking at my childhood hero in the flesh for the first time. A tall suave Italian guy in a nice suit and jet black curly hair.

Alex said, Joe, you gotta see what the kid is doing! Take a look at this stuff!"

Joe led us in and started flipping through the drawings and chuckling. He smiled real big, then smacked the stack of drawings and said. "This is what we've been trying to get for months now! I keep telling the guys that this is an old fashioned UPA style and that it's supposed to be flat but no one will do it!"

He then looked serious and a bit worried. "Iwao and Bob are great artists but they just don't seem to get this style. Tell me about yourself kid. Why is this so important to you?"

So I told him how I used to draw his characters all the time when I was a kid and that I loved this style and always wanted to do it. I had begged Bob Singer to let me work on it but he kept telling me I was drawing too flat so he wouldn't show you."

I went on, like an idiot to tell him I hated Scooby Doo and all modern cartoons, and Joe said "Me too kid. I've never understood why the networks keep ordering more episodes of it. What is there to it? A big dumb dog and some teenagers. Every show is the same Goddamn story! It doesn't make sense to me but they can have it as long they want it."

I was amazed that Joe wasn't offended by that. This was my first inkling that Joe really knew how awful the cartoons were that his studio had been churning out for decades.

Joe was rubbing his face and thinking.

By the way, he had the coolest office. It was filled with toys of all his characters and awards and he even showed off his private shower! He didn't get naked or anything, luckily.

Joe said, "Son, I want you on this show but I gotta figure out how to do it without offending Bob and Iwao. These guys got feelings you know. They been here a long time and figure they have seniority. But don't worry, I'll work it out and get you on."

To be continued:

I have so many stories that I think I will spread them out for a bit.

Coming soon:

Being a development artist for Joe on a project for Fred Silverman.

My stint on the Jetsons and trying out an early version of the Spumco production system.

Developing "Perry Gunite" in a trailor with Eddie's wife on the HB lot.

Being consultants for Cartoon Network with Bill, Joe, Friz and Don Messick.

Helping Fred Seibert revolutionize Hanna Barbera and starting the shorts program.

Making Hanna Barbera merchandise with Fred and showing the products to Bill and Joe.

Interviewing Bill, Joe and Friz for the Hollywood Reporter.

Joe reveals his selling secrets to me.

Joe's thoughts on "writers" and "executives"

Making my own caricatured Hanna Barbera cartoons and having other cartoonists try to imitate them.

Interested??