Holly Jolly Hoodlums
Put one foot in front of the other. Bumbles bounce. Mind your blood pressure, Hotcakes. Never trust a magician. These lessons, among others, were drilled into my head annually by the Rankin/Bass holiday specials when I was a kid. For our holiday card this year, I wanted to honor those stop-motion extravaganzas from my childhood by painting an assortment of some of the biggest creeps and goons Arthur Rankin Jr. and Jules Bass ever created.
“You silly children believe everything you see.”
The monsters and villains in this collage hail from some of the most well-known network television Christmas specials from the late ‘60s and early ‘70s: Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Frosty the Snowman, Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town, and The Year Without a Santa Claus. All of them gems of the genre, and all of them chock full of impossibly catchy earworms by musical director/composer Maury Laws that I still find myself absently humming every year around this time.
While illustrating this piece digitally would have been easier, faster, and cheaper, classic properties like these characters deserve a classic treatment. Besides, part of what I’m aiming for is authenticity, so it’s important to note that slick, digital art programs with convenient adjustment layers and infinite undo keystrokes weren’t available to the hard-working illustrators of that era. So despite my miserly gravitation toward things easy, fast, and cheap, I was determined to lay down these characters in old school watercolor on cold press paper.
Cold press paper is perfect for this frozen creep.
Early in the process, I resolved to not lean on inks or colored pencils for the line work and details. For the most part, I’m comfortable inking a piece with brush and pen, then laying down watercolor. Or, if I want a softer approach, I might paint with watercolor washes then focus those soft edges and cut in some highlights with colored pencil.
But this time, in an effort to work just a few steps outside my comfort zone, I decided to render the entire piece in watercolor, line work included. My tiny little number one brush had been gathering too much dust lately anyway.
“A yo-yo? I love yo-yos.”
So we collected our favorite scoundrels of the Rankin/Bass universe and arranged them in an array that suggests a classic, super-villain team-up. If Santa were Superman, this would be his Legion of Doom. Of course, we all know that every one of these miscreants was defeated — usually in under an hour — by the very basic concepts of kindness, patience, perseverance, and love. That’s probably the most valuable lesson drummed into me by the Rankin/Bass specials. That, and that thing about never trusting magicians.
The villains of Rankin/Bass.
Happy Holidays! If you want to see me put these reprobates down on paper, and hear Michelle and I discuss Rankin/Bass, you can watch the video below.