Harald

violet

2011-11-01T12:45:00.004+01:00

THE BOOK

2011-08-19T10:57:00.001+02:00

...and I mean it, seriously.
It will cover the artwork from 1995 - 2010 and I thought it might be interesting to keep you updated about the project here on this blog.
Anyway, all the legal things have been taken care of, so what am I waiting for, here we go .....

Gnomeo & Julia

2011-01-09T12:20:00.000+01:00

Just in time for Christmas....

2010-12-17T19:22:00.001+01:00

Gruffalo

2010-12-14T16:53:00.004+01:00

:)

2010-12-14T11:43:00.001+01:00

:)

2010-11-19T11:35:00.001+01:00

The Illusionist

2010-11-02T08:19:00.002+01:00

Hey,
it looks like we will be screening "The Illusionist" at next years HAMBURG ANIMATION AWARDS, in June 2011 at the Abaton-cinema!

Vienna

2010-10-26T10:30:00.001+02:00

2010-10-12T11:11:00.000+02:00

Bad Artists Copy- Good Artists Steel

2010-09-18T12:35:00.002+02:00

Charleton Heston in "THE SECRET OF THE INCAS"
And Carl Barks' "Lost Cities of Cibola"

TARZAN

2010-09-08T12:03:00.002+02:00

Some TARZAN-studies by the incredible John Watkiss.

2010-08-18T10:40:00.000+02:00

2010-08-17T13:10:00.004+02:00

I don't get it. This is supposed to be a film in the tradition of mephisto, right ?
Why dooes the poster look like a comedy ?

Ok, I get the inglourious basterds reference, though ....

HAMBURG ANIMATION AWARDS 5+6.JULY 2010

2010-06-23T18:43:00.003+02:00

Proudly presents: screening for the first time in Germany !

I'll keep you updated about the screeningtimes !
Just check back.

2010-06-23T14:46:00.001+02:00

On Holy Ground

2010-04-12T08:34:00.004+02:00

The HFF

This is the backlot of Potsdam Babelsberg, where they shot INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS and other highlights like POLANSKI'S PIANIST and the great silent ones, decades ago, like METROPOLIS, M,THE LAST MAN and many, many others-
I was teaching next door at the HFF "Konrad Wolf" for a couple of days.

Carre

2010-03-22T11:04:00.001+01:00

"Onder Vrienden"- Herman van Veen's 65th Birthday in Amsterdam, Antwerp and Cologne

2010-03-18T15:46:00.010+01:00

Carre, Amsterdam

iPhone Appl

2010-03-11T09:05:00.001+01:00

Coming very soon-

...but not with this cover.

Digital Productions

2010-03-08T12:56:00.002+01:00

My next talk by the way will be april 24,25 in Berlin .

Early Men

2010-03-05T09:31:00.004+01:00

I had an unexpected day off a couple of weeks ago in Frankfurt. I could think of nothing better but to go to the next natural history mueum and was very lucky to stumble into this exhibition of early men's faces, based on forensic research of the skulls. Totally fascinating.

Ferenc Pinter

2010-02-17T20:57:00.001+01:00

...and his marvelous work.

Hamburg Animation Award Poster 2010

2010-02-16T12:41:00.001+01:00

Berlinale

2010-02-15T09:30:00.001+01:00

Fröbe

2010-02-13T11:28:00.000+01:00

Mecki - The Exhibition at the Wilhelm Busch Museum

2010-01-17T11:35:00.012+01:00

In the mid and early-sixties, when I was still to young to read, we would visit my grandparents every other sunday afternoon. It was like a one and a half hour walk to their home in Bochum, a miner's-housing estate. There we would have coffee and cake, watch "Bonanza" and the sports-show and sometimes my grandfather would read the Mecki comicstrips to me, onepagers from the TV- and Radio magazine "Hoerzu".
I had those, a handful of Donald Ducks and ot much else, before Asterix and Tintin came in in the mid and late 70's. Comics still had a bad name in postwar Germany.

In 2003 I was asked to take over the still on and off existing Mecki-strips in "HOERZU" .
I worked for almost a year on them, until the chiefeditor of the magazine was fired , and with him went the strips.

The Wilhelm Busch - Museum is running an exhibition on 60 years of Mecki and last Saturday saw the opening of this great show. Most of the contemporapy artists and the widows, children and heirs of the late artists were present.

I spoke a long time with Mr. Petersen ( a paintor and sculptor himself), the son of the legendary Wilhelm Petersen.Ha was pariculaly pleased, that I had brought back a cgaracter, that his father had contributed to the mecki-cosmos, captain Petersen. He told me, how his father would take a trainride to Hamburg every week to deliver the original pages, work on the sketches of next weeks episodes on the way back and spent three to four nights on the clean ups.
He was working on his farm in north-friesland the day over.
Here he is talking to Reinhold Eschers widow, who had worked as an uncredited scenarist and writer on the strips, before Petersen took over from her husband, when he was burned out.

The gallery of artists...

Petersen worked in many styles, he like many other illustrators had lost his work for Ullstein publishing due to his nazi-conform illustrations during the 30's which forced him to work under the alias "Johnny Price" in, what they called, the "american" style.

The marvelous work of Hans Held and Reinhold Escher.

My corner....

2010-01-16T09:37:00.001+01:00

Mecki

2009-12-30T10:36:00.002+01:00

Mecki -Exhibition
Hannover2010
Wilhelm Busch Museum

Gruffalo

2009-12-21T12:50:00.010+01:00

In 2008 I had the pleasure - and I mean it- to work with STUDIO SOI on the 2009 BBC Christmas special of the GRUFFALO. Here are some of my character-sketches.Enjoy,H

Screening_The Princess And The Frog_Berlin, Potsdamer Platz, 03 Dec 09 with Andreas Deja

2009-12-04T08:44:00.006+01:00

Waking Sleeping Beauty_Cast&Crew Premiere, Nov 27th 09, El Capitan Theatre, Hollywood CA

2009-12-02T08:39:00.006+01:00

"WAKING SLEEPING BEAUTY" is a great documentary about the Disney Studios between the years 1984 to 1994, basically the era between the Nine Old Men/Ron Miller management-years and The Lion King, by Peter Schneider and Don Hahn.
This was the Cast & Crew Premiere on Nov 27th, El Capitan Theatre, Hollywood BLVD.
Fotos by Jamie Kezlaran Bolio and Me

Extra seats available

2009-11-18T02:42:00.002+01:00

Come on and all!

2009-10-22T10:56:00.000+02:00

Vader

2009-10-05T08:41:00.003+02:00

2009-09-28T09:23:00.008+02:00

I have been uploading a lot of vintage sketchbookstuff on my facebook-profile. For all those of you, who refuse to become a memberof facebook, here's the update. You can also check it out on Flickr. Enjoy...

Save the date!

2009-09-14T08:58:00.002+02:00

UP im "Spiegel"

2009-09-13T12:57:00.002+02:00

2009-09-10T17:21:00.000+02:00

Schlegl sucht die Wahrheit

2009-09-09T13:17:00.003+02:00

Just saw the first of two finished episodes of "SCHLEGL SUCHT DIE WAHRHEIT" at a press screening, including our animations. Looks great, I'm happy. Check it out , 15th 9.09, 21:45, NDR

Brother Bear-Repost

2009-09-03T05:40:00.002+02:00

This project was haunting around the studio for a while as "King Lear with Bears", before Aaron Blaise took it under his wing.
I was asked to do some PreVis on the bears based on what I had done to the gorillas in "Tarzan" and the llamas in" Kingdom of the Sun". Since the movie was playing in the time when the first asian nomads crossed the behring passage into the americas (at least at that point of development ), we started with looking at cavepainting of bears. I found a lot of very good reference and shapes in particular. I was amazed with the way those artists treated the straights and the curves for example. A lot of the reference we collected found it's way into the movie without change.

Of course , there had been many Disney ( and other cartoon ) - Bears already. I wanted to stay away from them as far as possible...

So I started my sketches based on this little toy, which I had picked up in a monastry outside moscow and which I always had loved for it's nice proportions. Now, I finally knew, why I had bought it...

And of course BART THE BEAR was a great inspiration, I watched and studied a lot of his movies and I was lucky to even find a documentary from National Geographic on him, what a great guy, rest in peace, Bart....

Look at the size of this guy, the head and the paw on the shoulder,the sheer "presence" of this wonderful creature, you easily forget this if your used to - and think in terms of- cartoon bears.I also visited the two kodiaks in the Hamburg zoo, and time and time again, my first thought was ;"M>y god, they are huge!" I wanted to capture this feeling by all means. But how do you draw "size" and "weight", without having a chance to give a relation on the same sheet , use an upshot camera-angle or just a part of the body ??? If you gotta show the whole body, even a whale looks like a herring.

I found the lower lip very helpful for this purpose, it always hangs down, makes a great tool for a follow thru , always looks kinda numb and there's spit and saliver dropping from it. It gives a great feel of size and weight to the drawing.

These above sketches were done with exactly this purpose. And after the bears went through the giftet hands of Rune Bennicke and all the other guys at Disney's , they looked really good...

.....more to come

Here are some early sketches for Kenai's face. I wanted to come up with something different from Pocahontas and stay away from Mulan as well, so I was looking at a lot of faces from the South-Sea for reference , even Korea and the Phillipines, Eskimo as well.
I wanted Kenai to be in the middle of his puberty , so I tried to give him a girlish attitude as well, long thin limps for example a alltogether puppyish feel.

This is almost the final design of his haircut, but it took me a long time to come up with it and keep it simple. I wated a lot of time and pencilmilage to come up with something fancy .

This is one of many costumestudies. I was looking for a way to anticipate the transformation into a bear in his costume, so I was going for a way of dressing, where he would just throw over some furs in the morning, that would also correspond with his impatient and impulsive character. I also liked the warpaint in this particular sketch. This sheet got into ther internet somehow and the buzz was, that Kenai was going to look a lot like Mowgli, but actually this was just one drawing of maybe a hundred.

In the early version of the skript , Kenais father, Chilkoot, would be the one who got killed instead of his brother,by Kenais fault of course, butthey finally realised that that was too close to Lionking , so eventually Chilkoot had to go and was replaced by Denaii.

What you see here a a couple of more face studies, mainly for Kenai's brother Sitka.
The maindifference between the two is that Kenai is the young, impulsive one, whereas Sitka is the clearer, more serious type, who's preparing to become chief of the tribe, sooner or later.
But all this changed many times during the production, and with every change in story, the characters changed, too.

You will also see a lot of different styles here, thats because , what you see ,is stuff from almost two years of work, some characterstudies, some costume, etc....
anyway, enjoy H

When we first started with the design of Tenana, the village's shaman, she looked like .... well, shamans usually look in these kind of movies until we thought , we maybe should try something else and started to make her look less like Pocahontas' grandma willow or even Yoda....

...so I did some drawings in which she was tall, bald and skinny. I liked that appoach very much, but others, like Michael Eisner for example, didn't and so they went back to the original design.

The original skript included a flashback to when Sitka and Kenaii were still kids and we'd have seen their mother , too.
This is what she'd have looked like.

There never was an official designprocess for Denaii. When Chilkoot, the father, was cut from the skript and the third brother was created, the directors just picked one of the Sitka's rejected designs for him.

Misc. characters, the fireman, the mailman, the shopkeeper ....

Just a costume design...remember, those guys made their clothing themselfes, they don't buy their stuff at Urban Outfitters. I wanted to make that visible, by maybe making the right shoe different from the left one , for example, or whatever....

2009-09-03T05:37:00.000+02:00

Here you see quite a lot of samples from my work for Roger Rabbit, Mulan, Tarzan, Kingdom In The Sun, Treasure Planet, Brother Bear, Fraidy Cat, The Snowqueen, Rex Havoc, Enchanted, Kwak, and Space Chimps and some others. Highlights from 21 years in the Animation Industry.
Can't show you the recent stuff though, sorry. Still hope you like.H.

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As long as they both have fun....

2009-08-31T08:43:00.001+02:00

Workshop

2009-08-29T09:35:00.001+02:00

Herr Selig-Early Sketches

2009-08-27T11:45:00.003+02:00

Genau, was macht eigentlich ...Herman van Veen ?

2009-08-27T10:42:00.000+02:00

Waking Sleeping Beauty

2009-08-26T19:56:00.002+02:00

WAKING SLEEPING BEAUTY
>From 1984 to 1994 a perfect storm of people and circumstances changed the face of animation forever

Directed by Don Hahn
Produced by Peter Schneider and Don Hahn

By the mid-1980s, the fabled animation studios of Walt Disney had fallen on hard times. The artists were polarized between newcomers hungry to innovate and old timers not yet ready to relinquish control. The conditions produced a series of box office flops and pessimistic forecasts: maybe the best days of animation were over. Maybe the public didn’t care. Only a miracle or a magic spell could produce a happy ending.

Waking Sleeping Beauty is no fairy tale. It’s the true story of how Disney regained its magic with a staggering output of hits - “The Little Mermaid,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “Aladdin,” “The Lion King,” and more – over a ten-year period.

Director Don Hahn and producer Peter Schneider bring their insider knowledge to “WSB”. Hahn was one of the Young Turks at Disney who produced some of its biggest sensations. Schneider led the animation group during this amazing renaissance and later became studio chairman. Their film offers a fascinating and candid perspective of what happened in the creative ranks set against the dynamic tensions among the top leadership, Michael Eisner, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Roy Disney (the nephew of Walt).

The process wasn’t always pretty. The filmmakers bring a refreshing candor in describing ego battles, cost overruns, and failed experiments that others might prefer to forget. During times of tension, the animators’ favorite form of release was to draw scathing caricatures of themselves and their bosses. Director Hahn puts several memorable ones on display and marshals a vast array of interviews, home movies, internal memos and unseen footage.

Announcing the world premiere of “Waking Sleeping Beauty” at the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival (http://www.tiff.net), the festival’s documentary programmer Thom Powers said, “’Waking Sleeping Beauty’ celebrates the rich history of Disney animation and honors the many writers, artists, and composers who created the Disney magic. The treatment is so thorough that it includes key figures who famously left Disney such as Don Bluth, John Lasseter, and Tim Burton. At one time, children imagined that Walt Disney’s signature meant a film was the creation of one man. This is a more grown-up portrayal that reveals the collaborative, often contentious, experience in all its complexity.”

WAKING SLEEPING BEAUTY

September 12th at 9:30am Press/Industry 1, AMC 9
September 16th at 6:00pm Press/Industry 2, AMC 9

September 15th at 6:00pm Public Screening 1, AMC 7
September 17th at 3:00pm Public Screening 2, AMC 9
September 19th at 10:45am Public Screening 3, AMC 5

Press Contact: Laura Kim, (213) 280 2273, laurackim@sbcglobal.net

Character Design

2009-08-23T09:38:00.002+02:00

Fleisch

2009-08-21T14:38:00.001+02:00

Unbelievable, the stuff you draw during one lifetime....

At last : Mecki Volume 1, 1958...

2009-08-15T13:22:00.002+02:00

Herr Selig

2009-08-15T09:56:00.004+02:00

Just finished work on 8 minutes limited animation for german TV.

What a career!

2009-08-02T10:09:00.005+02:00

Hamburg Animation Award 2009

2009-07-13T20:52:00.000+02:00

Long John Silver aka Barbecue

2009-07-03T14:49:00.001+02:00

Hamburg Animation Award - Evolution of a poster

2009-06-27T17:09:00.003+02:00

Winnetoons- Der Schatz Im Silbersee

2009-06-22T11:00:00.004+02:00

A couple of weeks ago this little german feature finally made it very briefly into the theaters. Back in 2002 (!) I made some PreVis for it.
It's of course ll based on the Winnetou-movies of the sixties.
Enjoy.

Story

2009-06-18T14:06:00.002+02:00

If I'll take one thing home from Annecy this year, it'll be the Pixar-presentation. Two things I learned from them: Peter Sohn gave an insight on "Partly Cloudy" and even in doing that, those guys find an emotional door, into what ever they want to tell you.
Peter talked and even had drawn some sketches of his mother, very similar to a storypitch in itself, who couldn't understand english and so favoured animation, which is -or should be- selfexplanatory. Wether you find that cheesy or melodramatic, that's not the point, what it teaches the storyteller ist : its peoples emotions, that are interesting.Everybody listenend to what he had to say.
And 2nd: Bob Petersen did a little talk on UP and layed out some basic story-rules, which of course , one has heard many times before, but which importance can't be stressed enough. Being a lazy bastard I give you a copy n'paste from Johannes Wolters' blog ( adress in the previous post )

twins ?

2009-06-17T10:51:00.002+02:00

Bob Petersen, Peter Sohn and Kevin Reher from Pixar, an american animation studio.
Foto taken from Johannes Wolters ' daily annecy-blog @
http://events.animationblogspot.com/

2009-06-08T11:33:00.000+02:00

Hamburg Animation Awards

2009-05-31T17:50:00.003+02:00

Teaching Character Design in Frankfurt at the Games Academy...

2009-05-14T06:15:00.002+02:00

Appeal/Celebrity Voices x Walter Lantz = $

2009-04-27T09:40:00.000+02:00

CTN

2009-04-24T16:46:00.005+02:00

My Interview on Drawn2gether.
Check it out !

Thanks Tina and Rhett!

Portfolio

2009-03-26T07:21:00.002+01:00

Made some updates yesterday.

Herr Döhring

2009-03-21T12:00:00.002+01:00

Ingo

2009-03-20T12:08:00.004+01:00

Couple of years ago Stephan Lethaus and the guys from 4K-Animation in Berlin and I toyed with the idea of doing a short based on tthe voice talent of comedian Ingo Appelt.
We never got further than the first sketches. For one thing the collaboration with the star proofed to be very difficult and funding convinced us, that nobody was waiting to see that movie.Well, ....

Die Klitschkos

2009-03-19T17:44:00.004+01:00

Alt.

Just play'n around

2009-02-28T19:13:00.002+01:00

2009-02-28T18:00:00.002+01:00

When you scroll down, you'll see that a couple of weeks ago, I got a lovely autograph from Bruno Bozzetto , whom I admire very much. I can retire now.
Anyway, this here is the first rough of my drawing for him, its Kwak petting the cat from Allegro no troppo. "Glad we're in touch" it says.

Walt Stanchfield

2009-02-26T18:26:00.001+01:00

Walt was animation and drawing instructor at Disney all thru the 60's 70's and 80's.
This are his complete handouts and lectures edited by Don Hahn in two volumes.
Its a keeper.
The book will be out in March.

Woman in Art

2009-02-25T08:45:00.000+01:00

2009-02-20T18:05:00.000+01:00

2009-02-16T17:01:00.000+01:00

2009-02-12T08:09:00.001+01:00

Still working on the illustrations for the cookbook. There doesn't seem to be an end to it. 1-3 illustrations a day.
But today I'm offto the berlinale for a change.Soviel Zeit muss sein.

2009-02-07T11:02:00.000+01:00

2009-02-06T17:23:00.001+01:00

2009-02-04T08:46:00.001+01:00

Wie spricht der Papst die Heil'gen heilig ?
Eilig, eilig....
Und ist ein solches Tun verzeihlich ?
Freilich, freilich ...

Musste ich grade dran denken....

Flambierte Erdbeere

2009-02-03T17:11:00.000+01:00

Westfalenspiegel

2009-02-01T15:34:00.002+01:00

2009-01-31T19:22:00.000+01:00

2009-01-30T17:09:00.000+01:00

Stolz und glücklich.

2009-01-29T14:37:00.000+01:00

2009-01-24T14:12:00.000+01:00

A major coincidence

2009-01-22T13:24:00.001+01:00

Glaser vs. Edelmann. And you thought we wouldn't notice....

Muffin

2009-01-21T17:23:00.002+01:00

2009-01-21T11:25:00.001+01:00

2009-01-15T19:50:00.000+01:00

Richard Williams on AWN

2009-01-14T18:29:00.001+01:00

Go ahead and read the rest of it @ AWN.com

2009-01-14T09:53:00.000+01:00

2009-01-12T18:43:00.000+01:00

Muffin

2009-01-10T19:00:00.001+01:00

Shrimp

2009-01-06T15:16:00.000+01:00

Plush

2009-01-05T18:47:00.001+01:00

Coming soon...

Stuff

2008-12-28T15:12:00.011+01:00

I just recently updated my portfolio at DieIllustratoren.de with bits and pieces from my commercial work mostly, and since I have that stuff still lying around on my desktop, I thought, i might as well share it with you. Hope you like, H

Christmas Treat

2008-12-23T12:14:00.005+01:00

Well, Christmas and Disney, those two things were unseparatable when I was a kid, the Disney-Christmas-Movie was a German ritual( And I don't mean Adam Sandler). To honor this I would like to share something with you, which I recently found on Youtube. Snowwhite in its first German dub from 1938 (!).I thought this was lost for ever.

There is also a very nice lik to a website listing all the German voices for any version of any Disney film ever dubbed into German.
Enjoy,H
http://edigrieg.ed.funpic.de/filmframe.htm

...and no, it's not : " Heil Ho "

2008-12-20T15:41:00.000+01:00

2008-12-20T12:10:00.001+01:00

2008-12-18T12:20:00.000+01:00

2008-12-17T11:31:00.000+01:00

2008-12-06T11:45:00.001+01:00