Today is July 25th, and you know what's funny about it? Next week from today will be the first day of August! In today's post, it's time for a new Watercolor of the Month, and for this July, the drawing I have picked to be the 53rd Watercolor of the Month is the Disney fan art of Mickey Mouse in The Sorcerer's Apprentice from Walt Disney's artistic masterpiece, Fantasia (1940).
Fantasia has been one of my favorite Disney animated films ever since I was a kid, and this was the movie that introduced me to classical music, and as time went on, it gotten me to appreciate it more and more. I love the animation, the animation is just beautiful and spectacular, and it blends so well with the classical music pieces the filmmakers have selected for each animated segment. My favorite segments from the film are Toccata and Fugue in D Minor (by Johann Sebastian Bach), The Nutcracker Suite (by Pyotr Ilych Tchaikovsky), The Sorcerer's Apprentice (by Paul Dukas), and Pastoral Symphony (by Ludwig von Beethoven).
This was the very first Fantasia fan art I ever did, as well as the very first fan art of Mickey Mouse as the Sorcerer's Apprentice. I have drawn Mickey before, even as the Sorcerer's Apprentice, but never did a full fan art, until I decided to work on it as a watercolor artwork. I actually presented it on this blog on my birthday last year. It was on my 28th birthday, which was November 11th, 2022. I have done a special birthday post on my blog before, with the first one I published a day before my 25th birthday was the full fan art of Baby Dory Playing the Sand from the Pixar film, Finding Dory (2016), back in year 2019. So, with The Sorcerer's Apprentice drawing from last year, it became the second time to do a special birthday blog post. And also, November was the month when Fantasia first premiered in theaters in 1940 - on November 13th. And of course, I also love the film's sequel, Fantasia 2000 (2000). I grew up watching it as a kid, so I love both Fantasia and Fantasia 2000 together.
The Sorcerer's Apprentice is the third segment in the film, Fantasia, featuring Mickey Mouse as the main star in his very first feature-length film appearance. The music was composed by Paul Dukas, based on the 1797 poem titled in German called Der Zauberlehrling by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Not only this was Mickey's first time starring in a movie, but also the very first time when we see Mickey's new design, which is the iconic design we see him today. If you can go back to the very first cartoons with Mickey, such as Steamboat Willie from 1928, he was all drawn in lots of circles (his head, ears, body, and hands) and straight lines. During the production for Fantasia, the animators began to change Mickey's design, so he can show his personality believable to the audiences. His head is enlarged up a bit, he's got expressive eyes with pupils, and a pear-shaped body.
The project begin on October 23rd with light sketching Mickey as the Sorcerer's Apprentice standing on top of the mountain in pencil. This was drawn on the fifth page of the 9 in. x 12 in. mixed media drawing pad. After the sketching, I can clean up the outlines with the ink sharpie pen, and erase all of the pencil outlines. Then, I colored and painted Mickey and the cliff with the watercolor pencils, and painted into a full watercolor medium, and then coming back to the drawing to add shadows for both Mickey and the cliff. With Mickey and the mountain already painted and done, I can paint the star-shooting night sky background, using two mixture of colors blue and purple, but also having to draw the shooting stars, and color them in white. The final touches to finish the drawing were adding the sparkles around the shooting stars and darken the shadow on the cliff, thanks to the acrylic paint. The black acrylic paint was used for darkening the shadow on the cliff, but wet the paint, so I can transform it into a watercolor-medium paint. The white acrylic paint was for the sparkles, except I did not wet the paint with water, because there was no needed to.
It was finished on October 30th, just a day before Halloween.
If you wish to read more about this Disney fan artwork and the process of it, you can definitely find it in the link below, and it will take you directly to its topic on this very blog.
By the way, if you are a follower on Instagram and Facebook, if you have followed me on social media, I have posted an image of a next upcoming Disney watercolor fan art. I will be sharing the very first fan art of one of my favorite Disney villains, and that is Hades from Disney's Hercules (1997). That will be coming up in August, along with the other new fun blog topics I am excited to share. If you do not want to miss any of the topics, you are welcome to subscribe to my blog here on The Autistic Animator's Desk. You can also follow me on social media, so I am on both Instagram and Facebook.
Here's an image for a sneak peak of the upcoming Hades watercolor fan art I've posted on both Instagram and Facebook.
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