Found more of my Disney Mickey Mouse Clubhouse work at the local Dollar Tree!

I went to the Dollar Tree today and saw they restocked all the coloring books! Was amazed and surprised that I found yet another book that had some of my old work in! This is the ninth book I've run across this year! They had another book there as well, but I had picked that up back in the Spring. It's in a previous post. I bought two copies for my archive.

Simply amazing! These were all in beautiful condition as well! I don't know how much they printed of this work once Bendon acquired it but it's still sitting in some giant warehouse somewhere out there waiting to be stocked and sold at some store.

I ran across my MICKEY MOUSE work at a BJ's Wholesale Club!

I was doing some shopping at a local BJ's Wholesale Club and came across a stack of Mickey Mouse books in the kids section. They had a Mickey book and a Disney Babies book (where the characters are all drawn like babies). Any time I see a Mickey Clubhouse book like this I feel compelled to check it out and I was not disappointed.

I turned the cover and the first page was MY art! Wow! I turned to the second page and it was mine again! I kept turning and, needless to say, I had to buy it for my archive. While my name is not in it, it features some of my work that sits in the official Disney archive for future use!

This was published in 2024 by Phidal Publications that is in Canada! They have a US office in Florida. I did check out their site (phidal.com) and they have many other Disney books available. I didn't see these particular books so I'm guessing these are now currently out of print.

Always nice to run across my work by accident and I am happy it continues on! 

 

My Disney work travels further than I do... and it goes around the world!

Through the glory of eBay, I found yet another gem that had my work in it! While it looked exactly like any other version of my Mickey Mouse work (which was printed out the wazoo)... this one was different. 

How was this one different, you ask?  

It was was printed in 2011, in Mumbai, by Disney (India)! On the inside cover, it says that it was for sale only in India. Wow! Someone must have traveled to India in 2011 and brought this back to America with them and eventually put it up on eBay. I bought it last week to add to my archive!

Needless to say, I bought it as it was one of those foreign rarities that had my work and  name in it, and I don't come across that stuff often. I only have a couple pieces like this in my archive so I didn't mind the slightly rough condition of it. It reminded me, yet again, of how far the work I do can go! 

Originally, the Mickey Mouse (and Winnie the Pooh) work I did in America had my art credit on all the early printings. This printed copy from Disney (India) still retained my credit on it, which is rare! Usually once it goes back to the company archive they can remove any credit and the work gets thrown in with all the other art (since Disney owns it all anyway). Yes, some artistic credits remain but it varies here and there. Bendon Publishing, who publishes a lot of my older work in America, doesn't give any artistic credit on anything from what I've seen. Hence, why I bought multiple copies of anything I originally did back when the work was first released! 

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.

 

I'm Now In 3-D!

I was shopping in Target during December and saw that some of my previous work has now gone 3-D. From a large batch of work I did back in 2007 or so and still going strong today. I think they've repurposed the work more than ten times or more by now. I guess with the way movies have tried to get a dollar from going 3-D, I'm not surprised that some of my stuff in print had taken this turn into another dimension. It's a simple process when the work is in black and white. They did a nice package with the glasses and all! The little ones should love it!