BGs and Style - Part 6 - Scale

The greater the contrast between the size of your forms and the size of your details, the greater the scale.
After sending the service studio many of Jim Smith's designs of BGs and mountains like the one on top of the page above, they would send us back drawings like the one below it.

I Found Old Cartoons To Buy! The Farmer Alfalfa Show! Jim Tyre! Carlo Vinci! B and W Eros!

Holy crap! I found a great site where you can get tons of old cartoons that they don't run on TV anymore!

WORLD'S BEST COMICS!

http://wbcomicshop.com/shop/searchBase.asp?stS=&selectcategory=234

It's almost impossible to find B&W cartoons anywhere. They don't run them on TV because the execs tell me that kids don't like B&W. I know this to be a lie, because I have little cousins and whenever I visit them I bring armloads of old cartoons-Betty Boop, Popeye, Terrytoons and stuff, and the kids sit in front of the TV in awe! They laugh, rock back and forth cluthing their little toes and then after the cartoons are finished they act them all out then watch them all again! And again and again!

There was a kind of humor in the old cartoons that you can't find in modern cartoons and even in the great 1940s color cartoons.

Terrytoons from the 1930s have these lost styles of animation that later disappeared as animation techniques became more standardized and influenced by Disney.

Carlo Vinci was way ahead of his time. In the late 20s he had already figured out squash and stretch, he could animate dancing, he animated really sensual little furries. Each animator was figuring out how animation works in his own way. There were no rules and the gags are cartoony and crazy.

Farmer Alfalfa cartoons are completely wacky and unpredictable and a lot of pure cartoony fun.

50s TV Cartoons Had Cool Packaging!

Hey, in the 50s TV was a lot smarter than today. They had a great idea for showing old cartoons.
I remember when I was a consultant for the Cartoon Network, a few years ago, they used to have these 3 hour blocks where they would throw together unrelated old cartoons from different eras and studios and give the block a retarded name like "Down Wit' Droopy D". This was a dead giveaway that these were "old" or "used" cartoons. Kids would know this and the feel cheated, because kids think that new means better.

In the 50s, they would take old cartoons and make half hour shows out of them. They would animate a new fun title sequence and write a rousing theme song-like the Bugs Bunny Show's "This Is It". Then in between the classic cartoons, they would get real animators to animate "bumper" scenes of the characters talking to the audience which made the kids think the characters were real. It made the cartoons feel special and new. This was the inspiration for the bumpers in the Ren and Stimpy Show.

The studios that now own all these old cartoons tore off all these great title sequences and threw out the bumpers, so most of these shows are lost.

THE FARMER ALFALFA SHOW!

Here is a great discovery. The Farmer Alfalfa Show from the 1950s.

The shows are intact as actually aired on TV 50 years ago! With:

Rare classic Terrytoons-even black and white ones!

New Titles animated in the 1950s by Carlo Vinci and the old Terrytoons animators- but -here's the really cool part- animated in the 1930s style! So...it's like they had to remember how they animated 25 years earlier-so it has a bit of 50s UPA influenced style (what they were doing at the time), mixed with the typical Terrytoons style - mixed with the rubber hose style! It's a really funny combination!

Jim Tyer Bumpers!

Between the cartoons are these weird non sequitor bumpers animated by the craziest animator of all time!

The Original Commercials!

As in all old TV shows the programs were directly sponsored, and the characters from the cartoons in Farmer Alfafa do these long elaborate commercials for Tootsie Rolls. Animated by the real Terrytoons animators! So cool
I just ordered a whole bunch of the Farmer Alfalfa Show
http://wbcomicshop.com/shop/searchBase.asp?stS=alfalfa&selectcategory=0&1=Go&kfg=fromsearch
Now I'm gonna dig through the rest of the cartoons at World's Best Comics and dig for more animated treasure...

BGs and Style - part 5 - Contrasts in Texture, Avoid Even Spacing

BGs and Style - Part 4 - Use Organic Shapes AND FORMS

The manual pages below are about BG design, but they feature the principle of "organic" so I figure I better give you a clear definition of what I mean by that.

Organic as opposed to mechanical or geometric. Natural objects are organic. They are uneven, they flow, they are not symmetrical, they are complex. Humans, animals, rocks, trees, rivers and old cartoons are organic.

Nothing in reality is perfectly geometric. Man tries hard to make things into simple shapes and forms sometimes, like boxes, balls, mailing tubes and modern cartoons. This kind of form is simple, regular, predictable, easy and in most eras, boring.

Organic art uses smooth flowing lines and shapes describing various surfaces and densities and textures as opposed to geometric lines and shapes that describe all surfaces and substances stiffly and the same way. Organic art under control gives you an infinite palette of ideas to create from. Geometric is limited. There are only so many types of shapes you can make with straight lines and simple curves.

ORGANIC DRAWINGS

Organic comes in infinite variations and styles.



Stylized cartoons can be organic - and should be.

Of course you have to be a much more sophisticated, intelligent, cultured and skilled craftsman to be able to take advantage of organic art, but if you regularly haunt this blog that's your goal, isn't it?

If you want the easy way, then get a circle template and a ruler and you can create cartoons like these:

GEOMETRIC DRAWINGS

Because the trend for the last 30 years has been stiff, regular and evenly composed art, it makes it hard for me to hire current artists-especially if they are over 25 and set in their ways. This happened to me on The Ripping Friends. I hired 2 Canadian studios who were used to drawing in the Canadian style, which is even stiffer than the LA styles. Jim Smith and John Dorman would draw brilliant backgrounds and character layouts and we would send them to the Canadian studios who would look at them in disbelief, toss them away and then "correct" the drawings by spacing every object in the scene on a grid and standing all the characters straight up and take out everything interesting or worth looking at.

LOOK AT HOW DIRTY CANADIANS DRAW

GOD, HOW THEY MUST HATE KIDS.

So I made all these manuals to try to teach them. The younger folks, Helder, Kristy, Nick, Steve, Jose and a few more caught on quick. They hadn't been ruined by Nelvana yet. Jess already drew in an organic old fashioned sophisticated way, so I didn't have to teach her anything.

The studio's old guard of calcified brained 30 year olds and older were hopeless. They couldn't even grasp a single concept I wanted - and refused to even try.

So here's more free information for you. Learn it and practice it and if you become decent and functional, work for me. If you understand these concepts you will be suicidal working on Samurai Jack or the other million modern cartoons.