Remember When?

Once upon a time, I worked on Pinky and the Brain. It was my first job at Warner Bros.  Back in those days, schedules were really lax compared to what we have to crank out today. In fact, I spent the first six weeks on the job doing nothing. Literally nothing, because the writers were horrendously behind schedule.

Anyway, since the schedules were reasonable(though we didn't know that then, I remember hearing people complain about how tight the deadlines were!), we'd be able to have some drawing fun on our own. My cute friend Becca just posted a few gems online, and so I thought I'd share the hilarity and post them here.


This is a birthday card that background painter Greg Dubuque did for Becca's birthday. The crowd that's running away from the robot is our particular crew, which includes director Kirk Tingblad, designers Steve Smith and Ashanti Miller, production assistant Lisa Melcolm-Weisman, storyboard artist Eric McConnell, and yours truly. And yes, Greg did a fantastic job on this!

Here's a card I did for Becca. Tallulah is Becca's bird, obviously. My colored pencil shading is atrocious, but I almost made a funny.

As usual on any show that a bunch of smart-alecky artists are on for any amount of time, the weird drawings are bound to happen. The following two are the result of a drawing...competition? between myself and the always-amazing Diane Kredensor. It all started with me drawing Pinky picking at the lint in his bellybutton on the far left of the below photo and leaving the drawing on Diane's desk when she wasn't looking. She then did a reply drawing(I think her first one was the nose-picking one)and left that on my desk. And so it escalated.

Each drawing was done on regular 8x11" paper, but after we finished the drawings, we took all of them and shrunk them down on the xerox machine, and placed them on official Warners Expression Sheet paper. In the usual production pipeline, all designs were xeroxed onto official WB paper and distributed to the crew accordingly. This is my expression sheet:

And this is Diane's expression sheet:

And this is the drawing that ended the competition. Some might say prematurely, but I say it ended just in time. Yes, I did it:

And so ends today's Nostalgic Travels. I have a huge box of Warner-era drawings in the form of both storyboards and various doodles, drawings, and whatnot from my fellow artists that I had the extreme pleasure to work with at the time. Becca's rummagings have made me realize that I should dig through my stash o' stuff and post what I have for the world to see. Because once upon a time working in animation was FUN.