Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Happy Birthday Walt Kelly!

Walt Kelly was born 96 years ago today.

Happy Birdday, as well, to Mike Kaluta! Oh, and Sean Connery!


Above and below from Songs of the Pogo



From the back cover of Pogo #11

This is a drawing I made of Kelly while sitting with a library reference file that I couldn't check out. It's from a portrait of him from the early 60s.

2 comments:

Daniel [oeconomist.com] said...

I envy your ability to do work of such quality under such constraints.

Thomas Haller Buchanan said...

Daniel, I will say it was intimidating. I was traveling on a research trip and stopped in at a small town library. While searching for stuff totally unrelated I came across an 8x10 glossy of this Kelly pose. Their photocopy machine was out of order. I had a sketchpad and charcoals in my briefcase, but I started sketching in pencil. Suddenly I thought i may never see this pic again, so I started over, measuring the proportions carefully and then started in with charcoal. Well, boy did I get dirty looks from the librarian, but she didn't stop me, cuz, like, what law was I breaking? Still, I knew they thought I'd get charcoal dust over everything, so I was SO careful not to smudge anything. When I handed the file back to her, she looked it over minutely, but I passed her scrutiny. Later I added in the whitish highlight. I'm not perfectly satisfied with the result, but like you said, there were constraints. Thanks.