new cafepress items - responding to requests

Look how much I love my fans! Ask and ye shall receive...

Steve Buccellato said...
"What about a Sody Pop shirt for men? That's what all real men need!"




Anthony B. Winegar said...
"... I'd buy more shirts if they where black. ..."




Spizzerinktum said...
"... More fridge magnets! ..."



applepwnz said...
"... One question about the cafepress store, as I recall, you can get mousepads from them, so if you were to put out a George Liquor mousepad I'd definetly get it!"




http://www.cafepress.com/happytime

Color Theory-Art Lozzi on Bob Gentle-Skeeter Trouble

Look at this beautiful background painted by Bob Gentle. The night colors are warm, inviting and comfortable, and all done very simply.

He achieves it without a Dreamworks or Disney budget, just by using skill and good taste- which unfortunately, you can't buy.
If you wanna be surprised at what colors are in any of these bgs, take these frames into photoshop and use the eyedropper to grab certain colors. Then double click the color to bring up the color palette and see what color it is. You might think the shadow on the tree above is brown, but it's actually dark purple. It just looks brown because of its relationship to the blues near it.

Bob Gentle is another BG artist I like in the original HB cartoons.

He had a softer edged style, not as stylized as Art or Monte and his best BGs give a feeling of comfort and warmth like these in "Skeeter Trouble".




The Bgs in Skeeter Trouble were drawn by Dick Bickenbach, who was the most conservative of the early HB layout artists. Dick was an excellent draftsman and always had really good compositions and handsome layouts. He did those great Tom and Jerry model sheets from the 50s too.

The combination of his less stylized drawings and Bob's less stylized BGs makes for a very different look than some of the more abstracted HB cartoons of 1958-like this one below by (I think) Monte and Ed.Someone wrote in and said that they didn't use red or yellow in the original HB cartoons because the cartoons would play in Black and white on TV. I guess that's not so.



I love this accidental mix-and-match approach that HB used in the early days. It made for a wide variety of looks. No "consistency" like they want so badly today in cartoons. Just a consistency of invention which is much more fun for people like me who get bored by repetition easily.

I asked Art about Bob and he said:

Bob Gentle
Hi John,

Bob Gentle, "softer edged". Good observation. Bob G. was from an era that used airbrush, oils, water color, guache, pastels and more. Monte and I never airbrushed. Our paints were the acrylics and an occasional pastel....for the softer edges.

But there was no need to soft-edge the characters which were drawn mostly with thick and thin black outlines, rarely using light and shadow on them. It would be contradictory, not to mention unneccessarily expensive. The word "limited" didn't refer only to animation. It included bg's as well. By the time it would take to pull out the airbrush equipment, set up the space, make sure the windows were closed, etc....I could've been on BG #44. Am I saying this right?

Look at the beautiful warm browns on the logs in the cabin and the also warm table cloth. Very very nice to the eyeballs.

Bob Gentle was like his name suggests. He was gentle, he was soft-edged, always smiling, always willing to be helpful. His training of course was mostly at MGM where we met, as far as I know. He worked there full time. At H and B he was working at home and coming in to deliver his bg's and it always seemed too short a visit. His wife, too, did cel painting at home.

At MGM Bob's style was not really his own creation, but rather the result of what the larger studios were turning out. He was able to please everyone, but you could identify his backgrounds. Naturally it was the layout department that established the bg's then. They were drawn up meticulously in pencil by them, given to the bg painter, where they were traced onto the bg paper and filled in with colors. Houses, furniture, scenics - these were all done in tightish perspective, realistically but also artistically. They even had to consider the viewers who were a simple working class group with families, many of whom had lived through the depression years and WW2. Jerry's mouse hole had to look like a mouse hole -in perspective. Their tastes were not sophisticated. Sophistication...now there's a word for you! How does it fit in with cartoon backgrounds? And yet it does.

Hey, my pal Kevin Langley sent me some more grabs. Thanks!
http://klangley.blogspot.com/2006/05/robert-gentle-and-art-lozzi.html

Gorgeous!

I would sure like to find a BG painter who shares my tastes and need for adventurous color design and texture. If you're out there, I'll find work for you!

Kali's BirFday Party

Well Kali had her birfday party over at world famous Mike Fontanelli's house Saturday night so I thought I'd share some of the precious moments with you.
Marlo arrived with the balloons in all my favorite cartoon colors.
Kali rushed to share the pink and purple globules.
I rushed to arrange some girl on girl action.Mike asserted his host rights and squirted himself in between where you all want to be. Look how smug the swarthy bastard is.Eddie turned up and accepted a sacramental pizza tip from the Birfday girl.
Things come out of Eddie.
Eddie and Mike are suspicious of the birfday cake I brought.

They decide to test it on the official taster.Marlo survives so now Eddie dives in for an ecstacy of taste.
Now he's discovered Mike's cake and tears it apart.Contentedly gorged, Eddie now allows Kali a piece.

Now he allows the girls some frosty action.Nothing escapes Eddie's notice.The cops arrive in the nick of time and Eddie tries a valiant escape.But his guilty pelvis is caught on film.
Kali is ready to open some loot. Mr. Horse supervises.
She presents her own graven image.
Katie jumps in with her own false idols.

Kali enriches her mind with classic American literature.

In the excitement, Kali goes into labor, then delivers Mike's baby.
Marlo and I show off our own baby.

Happy Ending.

Fox Pop (1942) - Bobe Cannon-Chuck Jones

In early Chuck Jones cartoons, Chuck gave his animators a lot of freedom to move things in their own styles. They had to use Chuck's key poses, but each animator had his own way of breaking them down and getting from one pose to the next.

This is an animator that I really like to watch-I'm not 100% who it is, but I'm assuming it's Bobe Cannon because it looks a lot like animation in earlier Clampett cartoons when Cannon worked for him.

If anyone knows for sure who this is, let me know!



















Whoever it is draws great and moves everything in a very flowing way-almost like liquid wrapped in a tight elastic skin that can bend and stretch when moving fast.

Nothing moves directly from one Chuck pose to the next-it moves in complex figure 8 type formations and waves, or it "smears".

It's not exactly what you would call funny movement, but it is beautiful and artistic and very distinct.

It makes Chuck's early films very entertaining to watch just from an animation point of view. When I first discovered this style, I was mesmerized-I guess I still am. It's a reason to animate, rather than just trying to imitate reality, or worse- to have no animation skill or fun at all, like today's cartoons.

Chuck's later cartoons were more restrictive in terms of movement, and for that matter, oddly enough, so were Bobe Cannon's.

Cannon's style (if this is him) gradually got stiffer, first in Tex Avery's cartoons at MGM, then in Cannon's own cartoons for UPA.

Fox Pop (1942) - Bobe Cannon
Uploaded by chuckchillout8

Clampett told me lots of stories about Cannon, how he got his name, how mild mannered he was, yet he was athletically built.

By the way, doesn't Chuck draw weird hands?? There's something perverted looking about this one, even though it is very well drawn.