If you're reading this, ever watched a classic Looney Tunes with the Roadrunner in it?
I remember as a kid I loved that series in specific, whether it was the broken physics or the deviousness of Wile contrasting the carefree roadrunner's attitude. Not-so-deep-down, I think I was also enamored with the set design and the landscape that was created for it.
There's one thing about that era of animation in particular; you could always tell what aspects of the scene were meant to be interacted with by how they were drawn against the backdrop.
The backdrops were almost always static, too. The painted desert scenery wouldn't move even as the angles changed and the characters moved. For the Roadrunner, there was even a modern art feel to the characters colliding straight into the backdrop as if to say it was only paint on a canvas. There's a certain element of postmodernism other times where that is what we come to expect, but the roadrunner goes on through.
The desert rocks were fantastically colored, bright, and patterned in some timeframes for the show. The distant backgrounds were almost painterly. There was this clash of terra cotta orange and sky blue in some cases that popped.
The Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote, of course, are the work of Chuck Jones, but what about the landscape? As an artist and designer, I want a name to attach, and that name was Maurice Noble.
Holy nostalgia. One image search and I'm shook.
I don't know where to begin.
This man's book on his artistic approach is upwards of $680 for a hardcover on Amazon right now which makes me wonder how many were printed to begin with (I promptly bought the Kindle version because beautiful hardcover or not, I had to read it). It turns out he handled the scenes and animation of countless Warner Brother works from Looney Tunes. Chuck described him as a horrible right arm because Noble thought out of the box and everything and enhanced every story he touched.
Freaking awesome.
Here I am in the meanwhile studying these desert scenes for the last few panels of my book. Those panels are such a small portion of the early story but they are everything to the story that will come after it. They're the open door to a bigger story and a bigger universe I get to create, and no better way to open those doors than getting a new outlet of inspiration to go along with it.
