June 1-10

Mermay has passed, and I decided to pretty much go freeform for the remainder of my art challenge year. Partly due to an upcoming trip, I decided that if I am going to follow a theme, it would be some Disney animation fanart.

I started June following that pattern, generally following the chronological appearances of the Classic Five (or Six if you count Daisy Duck as I did). Part of the reason I chose to start with the classic shorts characters is because I would be out of town and not have access to my whole collection. Since most of the classic group and a predecessor came from the black and white era, that worked out great. Eventually, I did get to color.

 I started with the first star for Walt Disney, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. I've come to really like the character since I heard his history, and I was able to get a DVD collection of the found Disney 12. Oswald really is pretty endearing. So, first honors go to him.

 Next would be Mickey Mouse. For the rest of the group I was able to follow a pattern of their chronological appearances and drew upon the shorts they starred in. Mickey's picture draws upon his first cartoon, which is actually "Plane Crazy," not "Steamboat Willie," at least production wise. Here is the Mouse in his plane from the short.

 Next is Minnie Mouse. I could have drawn from "Plane Crazy" like I did for Mickey, but I decided to play with the pattern a bit and go with one of the next ones, which is "Steamboat Willie."

 I also skipped a short for Pluto; he first technically appeared as one of the bloodhounds from "Chain Gang," but I didn't much care for how the dogs looked in that one, and it was hard to find a good pose to reference that captured Pluto for me. I opted to go with his next appearance, which is "The Picnic," where is he Minne's dog "Rover," but he has already started to look more like the Pluto the Dog we're familiar with.

 Next up is probably my fave of the Classic Five/Six, Goofy. Well, this is his first appearance from "Mickey's Revue" where he was called "Dippy Dawg." You may know that he doesn't become the Goof we know until later shorts. Here he is beginning his infamous laugh at the show, to the annoyance of the rest of the audience.

 Our penultimate character is the duck with a temper, Donald Duck from "The Wise Little Hen." And it's the first one that is in color!

 And the last character for the list is Daisy Duck from the short "Don Donald." I love her already apparent sass in the short. I kinda had to go with one her first poses from the start of the short.

While I intended to go straight to some of the feature films, I got a bit intimidating. I was planning to draw Snow White and the Evil Queen/Hag from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (separate drawings), but I have been feeling rusty with drawing more accurately human characters. That is something I will need to work on as I go forward over the next couple of months if I want to resume the theme. So, the next two are simpler images.

And the last image of this batch comes back to the start. By chance I'd found a video on YouTube from the Disney Parks channel on how to draw Oswald. I pretty much did the rough sketch along with the video before filling in the lines and darks with a black Copic.