Quickie Mickey (Times Two)
April 17th is a lot of things. National Haiku Poetry Day. National Crawfish Day. And, of course, as everyone knows, National Yellow Pig Day. But it’s also Quickie Mickey Day and this year I doubled my output.
Initial Steamboat Willie pencils
Quickie Mickie Day is a low-stakes celebration of animation history where everyone, no matter what skill level, is invited to sketch, doodle, draw, or otherwise create a Mickey Mouse, and post it online with the QuickieMickey hashtag.
Zebra G Chrome nib in a Tachikawa nib holder
This year, in honor of Steamboat Willie entering the Public Domain, he was my go-to rodent. And I chose to ink this vintage mouse with an illustration tool I only recently picked up, but one I always felt had a vintage aura about it — the metal nib dip pen.
One of the things I’m learning about dip pen inking is that, even with extensive hatching, your blacks are always going to be some percentage of grey. So, as a learning opportunity, Steamboat Willie is a good way of practicing hatching and crosshatching to achieve specific values.
Closeup detail of the hatching and crosshatching
But because black-and-white Mickey is more of a grey-and-white Mickey, I thought he could use something extra to help him pop a little on the page. A complement. A contrasting element. So I fired up the ol’ monster maker and sketched Runaway Brain Mickey.
The Runaway Brain was released in 1995 and hasn’t been caught yet.
And you couldn’t find a more character more antithetical to Steamboat Willie than Runaway Brain Mickey, a slobbering, chaotic monster from the 1990s that Disney has since buried in a deep hole hidden beneath their customary vault.
The Runaway Brain was nominated for an Academy Award.
But as much as Disney would love for us all to forget about the Runaway Brain, he makes the perfect counterpart to Steamboat Willie: Where one is black and white, the other is exploding with color. One is methodical, the other is chaotic. More simply, one is good, one is evil, and they’re both kind of fun to draw.
Opportunities to see The Runaway Brain do not come often.
Ironically, I spent so much time this year meticulously choosing which tools were appropriate to render each of these characters, that I completely missed the deadline to post this image on the day. But that might prove a point about the duality of self (and of Mickey): We can be ordered and focused and simultaneously confused and chaotic. Regardless, I’ll be ready for next April 17th. I mean it’s three circles and a smiley face. Why am I overthinking this?
My 2025 Quickie Mickeys and the tools I used to render them.
You can see the process video for our Double Quickie Mickey doodle at the link below.