#E.H. Shepard

[victusinveritas]

To celebrate Winnie The Pooh Day a long-lost section of the Bayeux Tapestry , featuring the little known story of how Pooh, Eeyore, Tigger, Kanga, Roo, Owl and Rabbit valiantly sought to repel the Norman invasion of England in 1066.

Illustrator E. H. Shepard drew this for a limited book bag. https://aclerkofoxford.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-danish-conquest-1000-years.html?m=1

[holespoles]

"Christmas is a togethery sort of holiday" said Pooh "Thats my favorite kind" said Piglet, "Togethery and Remembery." - A.A. Milne (illustration by E.H. Shepard)

[tomoleary]

Ernest Howard Shepard (1879-1976) "Supposing a tree fell down, Pooh, when we were underneath it?" Preliminary sketch for A. A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner (1928) Source

Original pen, ink and whitener drawing of Winnie the Pooh and Piglet Source

[mrmousetolliver]

Map of the Hundred Acre Wood (1926) "drawn by me and Mr. Shepard helpd."

[popsaturdaymash]

My first digital watercolor painting inspired by a request one of my co-workers gave me for an art piece. She wanted me to draw a piece involving one of her favorite Winnie the Pooh characters, Eeyore, as the main subject. This is surprisingly one of the very few attempts I've made at doing background art in a very long time.

So instead of the Disney version that a lot of people are quite accustomed to, I decided to take influence from one of my favorite versions of the character from the original stories by A. A. Milne and illustrator E. H. Shepard. This version definitely did hit a cord of nostalgia for me since it was one of my biggest influences in my work from the days of checking out library books in Middle School. I tried my best to emulate overall somber and whimsical tone of the original stories the best I could at the time.

This was definitely a much more relaxing experience and fun overall. Something about painting this was extremely peaceful for me at the time.

(If anyone is interested in any prints or pieces, feel free to message me sometime and we can talk!)

[blogjhm]

Christopher Robin goes upstairs to his bedroom taking Winnie the Pooh with him so he can play with Pooh and his other friends.

[thatwritererinoriordan]

Once There Was a Bear: Tales of Before It All Began (Winnie-the-Pooh)

[princesssarisa]

The Wind in the Willows and Pooh characters celebrating together!

[clarktooncrossing]

HEY THERE PEOPLE OF TODAY AND ROBOTS OF TOMORROW! IT'S ME, CLARK!

On New Year's 2024 I vowed to myself that I'd be more productive than ever, streamlining all of my ideas and making a decent living on commissions. While doing that I figured I'd keep my creative muscles limber by posting the occasional DUDEL or Sketch BOOM every now and again. Now chances are these won't be a daily thing. There'll be some days when I'm just feeling too bushed to scribble my silly ideas down on paper or I'll be too busy binging the likes of Steven Universe or Burn Notice. Yes, I am fully aware that those two shows make for a weird combination. Just imagine Michael Westen trying to help out the Crystal Gems, I'd totally watch that. Then again, I have a weird imagination as this DUDEL is about to illustrate.

Christopher Robin had many companions living in the Hundred Acre Woods. Though perhaps none plushy pal holds as special a place in his heart as his dear friend Edward Bear, or Pooh for short. Pooh was not a bright bear. Solving complex equations or discuss the philosophies of Plato were of little use to one who has fluff where his brains would be. Luckily brains aren't required to be intelligent. Old Edward more than made up for this when it came to his immensely large heart. Weather is was protecting his pal Piglet from Jagulars, helping his friend Eeyore find his tail, or simply bouncing around with Tigger, Eddy was the bear everybody turned to. Including Matt Whimsy, the animation magician of Hollywood responsible for Freddy and Fiona Fox. He and his animation team at Whimsy Studios adapted the classic tales of this lovable teddy bear into a series of movies over the years that have outlived A.A. Milne, Matt Whimsy, and even Christopher Robin himself. Now today fans of the characters can meet them at Whimsyland in California whenever not riding Edward's Excellent Expedition, helping the gang from the woods find the fabled North Pole!

Maybe I can help them find it after completing an entire Sketch BOOM. This was meant to be the start of one right up until Rosie Stardust foiled my plans. Dang that Cosmic Cutie and her alien design! Having said that, expect more from my multiversal adventurer later. For now I couldn't let a good design go to waste. What prompted me to draw this was Whimsyland, my answer to the question of what is Brooklyn Nine Nine took place at a theme park instead of a police precinct. Realizing I needed more recognizable characters for this fictional park, I decided to go with the ones that were thankfully in the public domain. Really the challenge was coming up with a design that wasn't similar to those used my a certain company, which I think I succeeded in doing. What helped was going back to the original designs by E.H. Shepard and keeping to the simplistic mindset. My biggest hurtle was Pooh's attire since, despite wearing one in the original freak'n book, I couldn't dress him in a tiny red shirt. So instead I settled on a scarf to fit with his adventurous life style. Here's hoping we'll see more of Old Eddy, Piglet, and Tigger in the future. For now-

MAY THE GLASSES BE WITH YOU!

PS: Oh, you noticed the logo on the bottom, did you? We'll talk about that later...

[typhlonectes]

Winnie the Pooh illustration by E.H. Shepard

[petermorwood]

A day or so ago, @dduane reblogged a long post - a Canadian magazine article from 1966 - about the Americanisation of Winnie the Pooh.

It's an Impressive Tirade in which the writer (Sheila H. Kieran) says what she thinks about letting Walt Disney have a free hand with a foreign Children's Classic.

There's mention of the previous Adaptation Endeavour, "Mary Poppins" (1964) but it's very brief, perhaps with an eye to limited column space - or maybe because All Was Said Already in a previous review.

There is, however, rather a lot about the English characters being given American accents, and about the inclusion of a new character, an American gopher (which, the article suggests, looked vague enough to the Kieran children - its target audience - that it might as well have been a mole or a beaver).

*****

And that reminded me of another bit of American Animalisation done by Disney, in the 1949 short "The Wind and the Willows" - though in this instance it's visual since the voices are, for the most part, suitably British.

They include Basil Rathbone as narrator, and a horse who sounds like George Formby. In some scenes the horse actually looks like Formby, so this voice may not be entirely accidental.

Badger, however, sounds like a Scotsman - the worst kind of stage Scotsman at that - rather than how I used to "hear" him as a C. Aubrey Smith-voiced crusty retired colonel.

That, however, is just personal preference.

However, Disney's Badger is not a proper British (more correctly, European) badger, Meles meles. Here's one, which though not the most amiable of beasts in reality, still manages to look fairly affable ("I say, old chap, whatever are you looking at?")

Instead he's a North American badger, Taxidea taxus, which not only has a less affable expression ("Hey, bud, you. Yeah, you. You lookin' at me? You lookin' at ME?") but, more important, different stripes.

Here's Disney's version alongside mine. The correction took about five minutes of pixel-tweaking.

Disney's animators could have got it right from the outset just as easily, because I'm pretty sure the reference library which provided costume info for Rat's tweed Norfolk jacket and britches included picture-books of natural history.

Come to that, any "The Wind in the Willows" after the unillustrated first edition would have been enough, and there must have been at least one copy lying around for story adaptation and scene-description purposes.

The first illustrated edition came out in the UK in 1931, and its artist was, at author Kenneth Graham's request, the very same E.H. Shepard who had illustrated the Pooh books just a few years previously...

...while this Arthur Rackham colour plate is from an edition published in 1940 in New York.

So those books wouldn't have been impossible for Disney to get.

The problem, however, is that if a word ("badger", for instance) is well known to mean one thing here, it may be Too Much Trouble to find out if the same word means something else there, with the result that finding out can sometimes come as rather a surprise.

Check the UK / US meaning of "suspenders" to see what I mean... ;->

[holespoles]

E.H. Shepard

[tomoleary]

E.H. Shepard - Endpapers from The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

[cloudshades]

ilustrated by e.h. shepard for a.a. milne via instagram

[blogjhm]

There will be a new Winnie the Pooh book coming out on September 28th called Winnie the Pooh Tales From The Forest. Soon I will have all eight of these Winnie the Pooh books. And I hope they can all be put together into a new book called The Complete Tales and Poems of Winnie The Pooh Updated Edition. That would be so cool.

[harvsinthestars]

E.H. Shepard's illustrations seem to completely capture how I felt as a little girl. I can't wait for his illustrations to become inspiration for 1/3 of my final piece.