Edgar Balthazar Assisting Georges Hautecourt

In the summer of 2012 I did a series of drawings based on some iconic Disney characters. I thought it would be a good learning experience to draw in another animation style apart from my own drawings. The intention was to not simply create fan art within a very short span of time. I wanted to apply what I had learned from my UCF drawing courses to the Disney based drawings. So I made the artwork with my charcoal pencil on a 14x17 Stratford Drawing Pad and spent many hours over many days working and refining it. I would measure the artwork with my string or charcoal pencil to get the exact precision and distance of the individuals down. I treated it as if it were a huge drawing assignment for class so there are pencil marks left over and many changes regarding the size made to the artwork.

The drawings I used as reference were from the Walt Disney Studio’s Animation Archive Series. It’s a great series that showcases the studio’s artwork over a wide arrange of fields like Art Direction, Backgrounds, Storyboards, Development, and Animation. It was the last book that contained the drawings I was looking for as it included copies of the actual untouched pencil drawings by the animators. My drawing above is from the film “The Aristocats” (1970) with the butler Edgar Balthazar assisting the lawyer Georges Hautecourt. Balthazar is a character I have always liked visually because of his Charles Gibson inspired caricature. I also admittedly pitied him for his tragic life as an unsuitable Disney villain. As for Hautecourt he always made me laugh whenever I watched the film because he was so damn senile. It enjoyed making this drawing featuring the two of them and it is one of my personal favorite of the Disney batch.