Friday, December 26, 2014

Christmas with Old Friends


My favorite project this year was creating the corporate holiday greeting card for Warner Bros. Studios Animation.  Warners currently owns the Hanna-Barbera film catalog and I was beyond thrilled when they asked me for an original design featuring the classic H-B characters. 


There are so many good characters to choose from so, naturally, I chose the earliest ones and placed the style in the late '50s/early '60s.  Ruff and Reddy, Huckleberry Hound, Yogi, and Boo-Boo Bear are constructing a paper tableau using the very tools I used to create the actual scene. 


On the flip-side, Quick Draw McGraw and his sidekick Baba Louie are assisting from behind the scenes.



This was so much fun to work on, and required some tricky staging to pull off the illusion that the flimsy paper characters were actually supporting the scissors and x-acto knife.


The interior of the card had its own special tableau, as well.  I thought it could be fun to contrast large and small characters together in one shot:


Magilla Gorilla dangles a real vintage ornament (from our own Christmas tree at home) while the mice Pixie and Dixie leap around.  Incidentally, I hope everyone out there reading this is familiar with all these great Hanna-Barbera characters.  We don't see them very much today—except perhaps for Yogi Bear—which is quite a shame.  I spent countless hours of my kidhood enjoying the TV antics of these characters, and it was a dream come true to be able to revisit with them for a short while as they skipped across my workbench.