Eisenberg and Hazelton* Contrasted

Harvey Eisenberg's natural style was fairly traditional - basically very rounded characters like 40s animation: Tom and Jerry. When he started having to draw comics using Ed Benedict's more stylized angular characters, he went through a transitional period where he tried to adapt.
His clean compact and controlled compositions were evident right away, but he had some trouble figuring out how to tilt the characters' angular heads at first.
Yogi's perspective doesn't make much sense in the panel above.
His cheats became more subtle as he got used to working in this style.His staging is always very controlled and easy to read.
Gene Hazelton - who had a similar background in animation had some differences in his style. He works more on a part by part design basis. Each individual piece of his picture has a pleasing design and style, but the overall staging and composition is less organized than Eisenbrg's. Drawing your pictures piece by piece, rather than from the big elements down to the smaller ones inevitably leads to a more cluttered look.

I think Gene was more concerned about how the characters looked, and he filled in the trees and background elements in all the spaces left between the characters.
Gene's specialty was stylish cuteness. He was known for his cute kids...

http://www.cartoonbrew.com/old-brew/gene-hazeltons-angel-face.html

Harvey's kids are cute too, but a bit more pudgy, less Valentine's card sweetness - and again he is more concerned with the balance of the composition, the negative spaces, framing of the characters and readability and flow of the whole picture.
Gene is also known for his cute women.
Here's Gene with a less cluttered composition. With cute fishies.Here's Harvey showing off perspective and his easy organization (hierarchy) of a lot of detail.
I loved these strips when I was a kid and thought that the artists must be animators, because the comics seemed to have elements of modernity, appeal and style that was more evident in animated cartoons than in the general comic strip style - which was traditionally more stiff.

http://allthingsger.blogspot.com/2010/06/bear-with-me-tuesday-comic-strip-day.html

another giveaway:

Eisenberg - these men have overall forms that are pulled along the lines of action. Their details- hair, clothes, arms, facial features all are kept tightly conformed to their dynamic overall statements.http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2009/05/eisenberg-subtleties-studies.html

Below are Gene Hazelton's men. They have lines of action too, but less direct. Their details are sticking out more and breaking up the overall flow and statement. - but each individual detail - the shape of the eyes, the fingers etc. have interesting angular shapes.
Each part of that phone receiver draws attention to itself, but the parts contradict each other and break up the overall shape of the phone.

Harvey thinks from big to small. Gene thinks from small to small and hopes it all adds up in the big picture.

*** Mark Christiansen thinks that the art I'm attributing to Hazelton here is actually Iwao Takamoto. He could be right, although it looks to me like Hazelton at least did the finishes and the faces.

Either way, these are all great cartoonists and the differences between Eisenberg and the other artists are still evident.

Thanks Mark!

http://www.markscartoonart.com/

Mark is a wonderful cartoonist too, so go check his blog...

Animation School 15: Review: Drawing With All The Animation Drawing Principles Only

Here're some very early comics drawn by great cartoon technician Harvey Eisenberg. He hasn't developed his own unique style yet and that makes this very educational to study if you are a learning cartoonist.
These are drawings made up entirely of 40s animation principles. Starting with very strong construction. All the characters are made of simple sphere, pear and tube shapes. I say simple, but that doesn't mean it's easy to put them together so well.

Note that every character is the same design as Tom and Jerry and only superficial details that define the characters' species are differentiated. The chicken has feather and a comb. The dog has jowls. The pig has a snout and pig ears, etc...but everything else about them is exactly the same, just like Tom and Jerry. It made sense as animators were learning all the difficulties and principles of movement that they kept the characters fairly simple to draw - and solid, so they could easily turn them around in all dimensions. Many early characters hadn't evolved individual character designs yet. But they had everything else important to animating and clarity.

Clear Staging/composition
http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2009/01/disney-principles-staging-3-make-your.html

Line Of Action

SilhouettesOpposing Poses
http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2006/11/composition-7-compose-your-poses.html

The one stylistic statement that is consistent in this comic is that all the perspective in the backgrounds is rounded. Round streets, round fences and houses etc. This was a standard early 30s cartoon style and you don't see it in many 40s cartoons.

This Eisenberg comic is pure Tom and Jerry style. By the 1940s, most of the advanced studios had gone past this pure, rounded spheres and pears approach and were starting to vary their character designs, background designs and some directors' styles were becoming very individual. Bill and Joe hung on to this basic early 40s style longer than anybody. Joe himself was reluctant to change as long as his cartoons were popular and winning Academy Awards. He didn't start creating individual characters with their own unique designs until forced into television. Then he hired Ed Benedict who gave the Hanna Barbera studio a style and a cast of individual characters on the cheap.

Harvey Eisenberg continued drawing the HB comic books and strips and his style gradually became more individual
and he mixed it with Ed's later.
That was goodbye to pure pears and spheres (Preston Blair) and hello to more complex shapes, curves and angles, but it was not goodbye to good solid drawing principles. Not yet.http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2009/05/eisenberg-subtleties-studies.html

His solid cartoon foundation that led to so many other styles later is really evident in this comic book:
http://comicrazys.com/2010/01/15/petey-pinfeathers-red-rabbit-comics-7-1948-harvey-eisenberg/

The point of this article: Learn Your Principles First,

40s animation principles step by step

and then style will come.
http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2008/09/good-cartoonist-can-adapt-to-different.html

Hey and lots of thanks to all the students and fans who contributed to the cartoon lessons. If you folks do any of the lessons, remind me and I will give you some tips:

The Stiff Period to the Fluid Period. No Balls on Balls

I'll get to the Popeye toy real soon, but first to set it up.
here is another sample of a lesson from the mysterious secret cartoon college:I suggest (if you don't already) supplementing your cartoon studies with some life drawing. (I know this is a photo, not a live model)

Why should you?

Because when studying Preston Blair type construction - made of spheres and pear shapes, there is a tendency for some cartoonists to think cartoon characters are made up of balls piled on top of each other. Or they draw the balls and pears too mechanical and not organic enough.

Also another point: THE STIFF PERIOD OF LEARNING
Any time you learn a new concept or drawing skill, when you actually first try to draw it you will probably be very stiff, because you haven't practiced the concept enough for it to sink in. This is the tough period of learning anything.

Drawing 1 - STIFF, study drawing. Slow and careful, grinding my teeth

When I first drew this guy, I slowly, carefully blocked in the construction first - having to think about the types of shapes that make up a strong man. I couldn't use balls and pears because real life is made up of more complex parts. They are still solid forms, but bendable solid forms. They are complex organic forms.

Once I finished the first drawing, I knew a lot of things I didn't know before: How the traps are shaped on one side compared to the other in a 3/4 pose. What biceps look like from 2 different angles in relaxed mode. How the biceps fit next to the triceps and the space between.

How muscles weave in and out of each other under the skin. The feeling of flesh, not just the wooden proportions of man.

How the 6 pack works as a whole unit before it's split into parts

How big pecs hang in repose (it's very important to know this, especially for you girls)

etc.

Drawing 2 - Looser yet still solid, more organic and confident, more fun to domy conservative attempt at Chloe's style

Then I redrew the drawing faster and looser - while still trying to keep all the forms solid, but to make them less stiff, more flowing: more ORGANIC

Some artists go too far in the direction of organic lines and get wobbly formless characters. I actually really like this one below. It's very funny. Some artists are too stiff and draw mechanical characters.Ever see those Gene Deitch Tom and Jerrys made in the 60s in eastern europe? They are a total misunderstanding of the 40s American animation style. The characters are drawn stiff and move stiffly. They look like they are made of badly drawn balls stacked on top of each other. Here's a weird combination of wobbly and stiff at the same time. That's an achievement! Whenever anyone draws Tom and Jerry now, they give them these bulbous balls for toes that they never had in the original cartoons.

The trick to good drawing is to combine solidity with fluidity. And life.

You have to look at both sides of an object (say a bicep) and draw the whole form, not two lines on either side. Look at the form inside the lines.

I made a mistake in my muscleman drawing above that I warn everyone else about: the side of the man's head that is closer to us (on the right) is too cramped. I squashed the space between his face and cranium. Lots of us have that problem.

Preston Blair Forms don't work for everything!
I saw one student's attempt at caricatures and he was trying to construct them as if they were Preston Blair forms.

That doesn't work.

When you draw from life- DRAW WHAT YOU SEE

Don't try to impose what you think things are supposed to look like. We aren't made of balls and pears. Only old animated cartoon characters are because those kinds of forms are easier to tun in space and they provide a simple foundation for many other concepts and principles.

What you learn from drawing from life and using your eyes to observe new things can then be applied to your cartoon drawings in simplified form.

Very Organic and Solid Preston Blair FormsThese drawings are not remotely realistic. They have no real anatomy. They are entirely made up of animated cartoon forms - spheres and pears. Yet they don't look mechanical and they are full of life. They aren't balls piled on top of each other.
Here it is done wrong: 1980 Tom and Jerry at Filmation, Balls on balls. A complete misunderstanding of the 40s style. We used to laugh and cry at these model sheets at the same time when working on these cartoons. (Thanks to Tom Minton for saving these hilarious monstrosities)



These Eisenberg characters are much more convincing as life forms, even though they have no literal realistic anatomy.

That's because they obey some principles of reality. They are organic and solid at the same time. Asymmetrical in a natural way. They have weight. They are not robotic.

See how the arms wrap around that log? They are flattened at the bottom, but bulge out at the top where they are not being compressed against anything. That makes sense and makes the drawing believable and alive.You can really feel this drawing of Tom smashing into the log. It makes sense. It isn't random distortion. (His belly is accidentally painted wrong; that's why he looks skinny at first.)

It's organic and solid at the same time - and obeys some expected sense of physics.

Don't draw stiff (except when learning and you can't help it). Don't draw wobbly. Aim at drawing convincing solid organic life.

SOLID, YET PLIABLE OR "ORGANIC"