Blair, and Other Stuff

Below are some crude attempts at drawing William Demarest as a rabbit.

And...More Blair

More Blair

Some smudging occured in the scanning process. Alas, time was short.

First Batch of Preston Blair Drawings

Sketches of Albert

Albert's First Word

My Comic Hero

While I'm waiting to get more pictures up, here's an opportunity to post some Buster Keaton.

This is a scene from The Scarecrow, with Buster's surreal take on bachelorhood. Don't ask me why it sounds like Rosemary's Baby.

Structure, Integrity and Nonsense

In the early days, Albert was very grotesque.



A "Bill the Cat" knock-off with a missing ear, not unlike Matt Groening's "Bongo".

This particular version of Albert was used for a t-shirt I made to parody those moronic "No Fear" shirts that kids were wearing in the early 90's. It blasted the words "FEAR: If you're living on the edge, I hope you trip".

Albert became a symbol for my own insecurities, and remains one to this day. But I also realized very recently that one of the major aspects of Albert's character is repressed rage. Albert is a very angry bunny. On the surface he's very cute, shy and insecure. But inwardly he's pissed off at just about everything. He's angry about everyone walking all over him. He's angry about not getting laid. He's angry about life being so complicated. He's angry at himself for being so angry. The conceit being that although he is a rabbit with rabbit instincts, his cartoon status forces him into situations that he's simply not equipped to deal with, much the way we humans are.

Look how emotional Bugs Bunny gets in this clip from Tortoise Wins By a Hare:

Tortoise Wins by a Hare
Uploaded by thadk

This is what I aspire to.

My drawings of Albert have always hit or miss, and rarely consistent. Sometimes I do a drawing where I feel I've nailed it, and then I'll have trouble recapturing it. The reason, I finally realized, is that I never nailed down a definite way of structuring him. This is what I'll be attempting to do here.

As I noted before, I have no way of scanning images, so the following are just some basic line drawings done on my computer.



Here's the basic shape of Albert, with a triangular body and traditional, cartoon rabbit shaped head. With the body I want to give the sense of a skeleton underneath, covered in a loose fitting sheet of fur that makes him look like a walking triangle.



There's even a sense that he's stumbling over himself when he walks. Here's a very brief walking demonstation:



Now here's the body beneath the triangle:



And the basic head structure:

One thing I've always liked about the design is the way is nose slumps over where his mouth should be, even though it's a bit awkward joining the neck to the head, drawing him with an open mouth, or animating him talking, but it's still one of the things I like most about the design. I've thought about making him a "silent" character, but decided it would be best to let him talk when he needs to, especially when he needs to vent. So these are some of the elements I'm working with.

Anatomy of a Rabbit

For about twelve years now I've been drawing a little rabbit named Albert (pronounced "Al-bere").



Like many rabbits, his drives are very simple; survival and replication. His tendency to obsess and over-analyze makes it difficult to achieve these basic needs.

He's one of many rabbits I drew throughout my childhood. I eventually settled on the current design, which hasn't changed much since junior high. These are pictures of Albert as he appeared in my eighth grade year book:







As you can see, I was...very influenced by Berkely Breathed, to put it mildly.

The design has undergone some minor tweaks, making him a little more traditional and rabbit-like (and not infringing on anyone else's copyrights), with just enough to distinguish him from other cartoon rabbits.

This is Albert as he appeared on a mixed CD I made for a friend, circa 2003:



I got on this weird kick of showing Albert being mutilated in various ways. It all began when I was subbing for an art class and I grabbed one of those "creativity tests" and created this image:



I started thinking of Albert as a grim extention of Buster Keaton. I even toyed with the idea of giving him special powers, or simply the ability to defy death. But in the end, he's simply a core personality that can thrive in any number of stories and situations.

My drawing stalled a bit during high school, and never fully recovered. I started focusing more on filmmaking, girls, and something that seemed very new at the time, the internet. But now everything's come full circle. I started up this blog in order to participate in the John K/Preston Blair online drawing course. I'm without a scanner at the moment, so I can't display any work that's less than a year old. But the important thing is that I'm drawing again, and eager to pick up where I left off in the development of Albert. This is a blog intended to chronicle that journey.

This'll involve redesigning the character, creating stories, and figuring out ways to animate him.

Lately I've been doing some crude experiments using Benettonplay, an online flipbook site:



It's incredibly frustrating, since there's a limit to what you can draw within a frame (which is why Albert has no ears) but until I get software it'll have to do. This particular sequence was more-or-less improvised just to give a sense of what Albert will be like fully animated. I'm going to continue to experiment with these and post them in the future.