John Nevarez just posted a slew of drawing notes by Paul Felix and Jim Schlenker “created for a layout/composition class some years ago.” I’ve mirrored them below. Check out John’s blog for more inspiration.

Click the image to download the PDF.

Outside of Chris Sanders awesome designs, I’d say the best part about Lilo & Stitch for me is the water color backgrounds. Here’s a few pages from the book, “Collected Stories From the Film’s Creators,” where artist David Wang talks about his painting techniques on the film. Very cool stuff.

Three weeks ago I posted about the amazing photography of Harold Edgerton. Unfortunately all I could find to post were photos I found through Google Images. Since I got the book last week, I’ve been able to scan some of the photos that are more resourceful to animators. Edgerton came up in a class on Squash and Stretch, one of the principles of animation. The point was to illustrate that everything squashes and stretches, which Edgerton’s photos below clearly show. There’s also some multiple-exposure shots for motion reference. I’d recommend buying a copy if you can afford it. Click images for larger versions.

On Animation reader Joel Brinkerhoff recently shared these scans with me. They’re from Albert Hurter’s super rare Sketchbook, He Drew As He Pleased. If you have anything you’d like to share with the community, feel free to send it here.

Hey guys, Peter Driscoll here! I’m going to be contributing to On Animation for a while, which I’m very excited about! I work in the animation industry here in the UK and I’ve been very lucky to have worked at some really great studios during my very short career so far. I hope to be able to make posts from our wonderful animation community, and share and learn with you all!

I thought my first contribution would be to post a much fuller copy of the Disney Sample Portfolio Notes (these guys really know where to place lines!) These are a little bulkier than before: 89 pages long and with some notes! I’ve spent some time cleaning up the pages so that they are a little clearer to look at. I’ve also included a PDF download here. So far, all we know is that the notes came from sometime in the early nineties, and that these notes in particular, possibly came from the Paris Studio. If anyone knows anymore info, I’d love to hear it. Enjoy! Pete

The things you find when you buy used books! Here’s a couple of great newspaper clippings I found in my copy of That’s All Folks by Steve Schneider. The first is an article from a July 24th, 1990 issue of the New York Post commemorating Bugs Bunny’s 50th birthday. An interesting read to say the least. Secondly, an obituary for the late Rudolph Ising from the New York Times (July 23rd, 1992). Enjoy!

This post got lost in the server move, so I’m re-posting it. The second batch of images of Captain Hook and Mr. Smee from the Peter Pan Sketchbook. Click here for the first batch. The Disney Sample Portfolio has also been re-posted.

Here’s some pages from the Sleeping Beauty Sketchbook. These exquisite images explain exactly why this is the rarest, and most expensive of the sketch books released to date. If you’re lucky enough to track down a copy, you should snap it up.

So this is what I’ve been studying for the last few months trying to understand cartoon construction. This is as per the recommendation of John K on his blog. It can be found in pieces all over the internet, but I find PDFs more convenient. You’re going to have to print it anyway to study, so you might as well just download one file! Enjoy, this book is amazing.

Preston Blair’s Advanced Animation

P.S – I didn’t even compile this, a friend of mine did. I’m just passing it on because I like to share. Credit goes where it’s due (you know who you are, and thank you!)

Update – January 11th, 2009

The FAC Course PDFs have been removed from my servers at the request of the Famous Artist School. I have been informed that a new digital version of the course is in the works and is almost ready. After asking for more information on this new course so that I could promote it, I received this statement from the Famous Artist School:

The new Famous Artists Creative Art Course will incorporate the classic instructional materials from earlier editions of the FA Course, with additional demonstrations and examples from master artists, lots of color, and updated references.  This reorganized version will consist of ten Foundations chapters and Assignments, which all students will take; followed by a choice of three electives:  Painting, Illustration, and Design. These electives, with fourteen Assignments each, allow students to follow their own special art interest after having received a solid grounding in the basic foundations of art.

The Creative Art Course will be available for download and on DVDs.   We will continue to handle the Assignments in physical rather than virtual form, however.  That is to say, students will complete the Assignments and mail them to FAS.  Their individual artist/instructor will give hands-on personal attention to each lesson, creating overlays showing changes and improvements, and writing a comprehensive letter of explanation, all of which will be returned to the student along with the Assignment.  Digital images of the original Assignment and the corrections are made by FAS and kept in a portfolio which can be requested by the student at any time.

The following is the original post

The Famous Artist Course I am sharing with you today is the Commercial Art & Illustration course from 1960. The Famous Artist School, founded in 1948 by Al Dorne and Normal Rockwell, released updated editions of this course and other courses (Painting, Cartooning, etc) over the years. There are three other versions of this course that I’m aware of: a 1955, 1964, and 1967 edition, though I am sure there are many more than that. Over the years they changed the order of the lessons, added and removed lessons, and changed the format of the course from 3-4 binders. Serious enthusiasts should think about getting as many editions as you can, but for the struggling artist, they share most of the same information from course to course. And for that matter, a lot of the material from this Illustration course was used in the Painting course. Which makes this a tremendous resource to artists around the world that I am happy to share. Thank you to my friends in Brazil for convincing me to do this.

The Famous Artist Courses can be tough to track down, with eBay being your best bet. Walt Reed’s book, The Figure, contains a lot of the same material from the Figure Drawing sections of the Famous Artist Course. It is still in print today, and can be found on Amazon for less than $15.

Here’s some interesting information from Wikipedia:

For the founding faculty, Dorne recruited John Atherton, Austin Briggs, Stevan Dohanos, Robert Fawcett, Peter Helck, Fred Ludekens, Ben Stahl, Al Parker, Norman Rockwell, Harold von Schmidt and Jon Whitcomb. All were making more than US$50,000 a year at the time, roughly equivalent to US$425,000 in 2006. Later faculty included cartoonists Al Capp, Milt Caniff and Rube Goldberg. Advisory faculty for the school later included Stuart Davis, Ben Shahn, Fletcher Martin, Ernest Fiene, Arnold Blanch and Doris Lee.

I took the liberty of tracking down some art from the instructors that wrote this 1960 edition because it’s good to get a feel for who your teachers are.

So without further adieu, here are the PDFs. I have uploaded them as individual chapters for convenient downloading. It’s not one PDF like I said before, but it’s all here! Please note that there is a good number of pages with a small warping effect in the top half -inch. This is a result of the ADF feature of my scanner, and varies depending on the resolution the documents were scanned in at. I’m a busy guy, and this is the best I could do for you. It won’t affect your ability to use the course, so please be understanding. You wouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth, would you?

Thank you all for your patience. Now enjoy the course!

[Download links no longer available]