It All Started with a Mouse

It All Started with a Mouse

Over five months of thumbnail sketches, penciling, inking, and coloring have all accumulated into this, my greatest drawing ever. I am not boasting by the way, I truly think that this is the greatest drawing that I've ever produced. Five months of work, it better be spectacular. It's nice to have it done, but truthfully, I will miss working on it. I had a blast drawing those characters, and I certainly hope that that comes across to all of you who view it.

As you can see, I decided to name the drawing It All Started with a Mouse although the subtitle of the piece is still The Cartoon Universe. I may have stated this once before, but it does bear repeating that I believe that animation owes a great deal to Disney and Mickey Mouse. Animation would be drastically different without the contributions that were made by Disney. There's a possibility that neither the Looney Tunes Universe nor the Hanna-Barbera Universe would exist without the Disney Universe, and that is why I decided to name it what I did. 

I hope that you all enjoy it.

The Next Panoramic 

I had sworn to myself while working on It All Started with a Mouse that I would never do another panoramic drawing again. Well...as they say, never say never. It didn't take long for another idea to come into my head for two more panoramic drawings although they will be smaller than this 4 ft. and 3 in. long drawing. However, I was only willing to do more panoramic drawings if It All Started with a Mouse was a success, and even though it has only been on DeviantArt for a few days it has been a huge success; the popularity is still growing. I do have several other drawings that will be done first, and so it will be a while before I get started on these, but plans are underway to creating a panoramic drawing featuring DC and Marvel heroes and another that features DC and Marvel villains. I am not like Pablo Picasso or Marcel Duchamp in regards that I want to be better than the most popular artist who came before me, and instead I want to be better than my last great artwork. It All Started with a Mouse is my best work in a long time, and although I don't know if I could ever top that, but if something could it would be these next panoramic drawings.

Back to Basics

The Defining Moment (Thumbnail Sketch)

We have to do a research paper in Survey of Sequential on an artist who is highly influential in the comic book industry, and I chose to write about legendary artist Neal Adams. Adams was influential in having comic book companies return original artwork back to the artists because before the companies were just destroying the original artwork, which is just plain insane. The image that we have of Batman today is credited to Adams who got Batman away from the Adam West version into the dark avenger that he was supposed to be. Finally, Adams along with Denny O'Neil worked on the Green Lantern/Green Arrow comic series, and they created relevant comics, meaning that the characters dealt with a social issue throughout each story whether it was racism or drug use. It was optional, but we could add a drawing to our paper except we had to include something that we learned about the artist. Since I am only taking lecture classes with no drawing whatsoever I chose to include a drawing to at least say that I drew in the Spring Quarter of 2011. I thought about doing a drawing where a character is dealing with an issue of social relevance, but the character that I had in mind wouldn't really get involved in social issues except drug use. I suppose that I could have him at the U.S./Mexico border fighting the drug cartel. Instead, however, I decided to draw something of spiritual relevance, and that is more down my alley anyway.

The thumbnail sketch seen above is called The Defining Moment, meaning that it is a moment where everything changes, where nothing will ever be the same again. In this case, the hero, the one with wings, loses the woman he loved through a heinous act, and he unleashes hell on her murderers. It's kind of a disturbing, morbid drawing when there's only one living person in it, everyone else is dead. This was one of the drawings that I had planned, but it was supposed to wait in line behind four other drawings; it got promoted. This is also the first drawing featuring original characters that I've done in a long time. I've been rightfully obsessed with fanart that all my original stuff had been thrown to the back burner, and so it's been nice to get back to basics. I am presently working on the penciling, and like most of my pencils, where I am following a thumbnail sketch, it looks dramatically different from the thumbnail. I'm always changing something in the middle of it. I am hoping this week I'll be able to get to the inking, which is where the Neal Adams approach will come into play. Adams inks with a Pentel marker and a pilot pen, which was completely stunning to me because I never knew that anyone could ink with a marker. I may very well butcher it especially when I am not that great at inking, but I am going to give it a shot. By the way, since I am expecting to butcher it, I am not inking on the original artwork, and instead I will place transparent Vellum over the artwork and ink that. That way the original can go into my portfolio as a penciled piece, which my portfolio is severely lacking.

This is Not A Monkey!!! 

The Vampire Mouse

  The Vampire Mouse was a character that I had created for my Intro. to Sequential class two springs ago, and I had thought that that would have been the last of him especially when I killed him off in the final story that I did in that class. I certainly didn't expect that I would fall in love with the character, but that's exactly what happened. He has been featured in a birthday card, an animated short, and presently, I am working on a script for a mini comic that will tell his origin story, something that I never came up with for the class. So the Vampire Mouse is slowly becoming one of my signature characters; and therefore, when I went down to Savannah, Georgia to participate in the annual SCAD Sidewalk Arts Festival I decided to introduce the character to the public by drawing him on the sidewalk at Forsyth Park. It was certainly a change of pace to draw not only on concrete, but also with chalk. While everyone around me was using bright colors on their work, I went dark, and that just shows that I really didn't care if I won the contest or not, which I didn't. I was not there to win, I was there to have fun. I had a great time although I could have done without the people who thought he was a Vampire Monkey. HE'S NOT A MONKEY!!!! Granted the majority knew that he was a mouse, but every so often I would hear him called a rat, a guinea pig, and a monkey. Though they did give me ideas for different villains that the Vampire Mouse could face in his mini comic.

Sadly, the Vampire Mouse probably no longer exists in Savannah since it was only temporary, either washed away by the park groundskeeper or by the rain. This was only the second artwork that I created knowing that it would not exist for the long haul-the other was a sculpture of smashed up toy cars. That does make the artwork a tad bit more special.

Final Thoughts

Well, I have to get back to work on my 20th Century Art research paper about Salvador Dali's The Persistence of Memory, and it's going rather well although I still haven't figured out what my argument is going to be, but I figured that I can at least write what everybody else's opinion is first. Whatever it is, I need to bring something new to the table. As Dr. Watson told us, we need to pretend that we're at a cocktail party and wanting to contribute something to the conversation; we don't want to repeat ourselves and have everyone staring blankly at us. Wish me luck. 

Until next time, this is Billy Wright, wishing you all a good night. So long, everybody.