Found MICKEY MOUSE work I did at the local Dollar Tree stores this weekend!

My old Mickey Mouse Clubhouse work is STILL out there for sale! AMAZING!

I ran across EIGHT books that were on sale at two local Dollar Tree stores this weekend! They were published by Bendon and reprint my work that I originally did for Dalmatian Press. These don't give me a credit line on them, but I have all the original Dalmatian printings which did. I picked these up for my archives as I didn't know these particular books even existed. They take the same batch of work I did and reprinted the hell out of them with new cover art.

I also took a new pic of the original art that I did of Mickey and friends in his car. I still have the original and this piece of car art has been used an infinite number of times. This artwork and the piece I did of Mickey and Pluto in an airplane have seen the most usage since I originally drew them. 

 

 

As you can see the original art has a background on it that is different from the printed version. When I did the art originally it was for a giant Mickey floorpad coloring book that Dalmatian produced. Then they erased the background and just kept the car art and multi-purposed it for coloring pages, activities, mazes, etc in normal-sized coloring books. 

A lot of the character art I did for Mickey had some kind of background on them (which were mostly later removed) but to maximize some later art, we then did the character art and backgrounds separately. That way a designer could mix and match later on based on the dynamics of different page formats. 

When I finished work on Mickey I moved right into doing a ton of Winnie the Pooh work. My Pooh artwork is all single character art and background plates. That art is still some of the best I've ever done and why I've kept all my originals.

Finally, I'd like to mention that the only downside to working with separate pieces of line art is dealing with all the bad tangents that can happen when you drop a character onto a background plate. It doesn't happen with color so much, but with pen and ink drawings it can be brutal. You then have to take some time to slightly adjust some elements on the background plate as the character art can't be touched.

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UPDATE! Through the glory of eBay I found a Mickey Mouse coloring floor pad and one of the pics for it (that the seller took) was of the page with my art! What are the odds?! 

Here's the original usage of my art before the background was removed to repurpose it! This is exciting to show you! This particular coloring floor pad was produced in 2013 and was yet just another reprinting of the art I did. I do have the original floor pad somewhere that was first printed in 2007 (and all the first original printings for this material had my name in them), but they really kept my art in print for many years!

As a final note, here's another page from this pad that features what I talked about before where the character art and backgrounds were two separate things that were then combined to make up scenes. Mickey and Minnie are two separate pieces and the background of Mickey Park was a separate piece. I don't remember if the clouds in the sky were on that background plate but even they could have been taken from another background I did to make a scene work.