Bernard Garbutt

Bernard Garbutt  was an animator during the Golden Age at Disney, where he also taught animal drawing.

I found this info about him online:

Bernard Garbutt (1900-1975) Born: Ontario, CA; Bernard Garbutt was born in Southern California and grew up in the Los Angeles area. After finishing high school he was hired as a staff artist for the Los Angeles Times to cover country fairs, horse races and farming events to produce drawings for the Sunday supplements.

Bernard Garbutt was an extremely versatile artist. He wrote and illustrated a number of children’s books, Including Timothy the Deer. The Walt Disney Studio hired him to work on the animated film productions of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Bambi. During WWII he was an artist for Screen Gems Productions in Hollywood and during the 1950s and 1960s, he taught at the Chouinard Art Institute.

Garbutt was no expert in personality animation, but he animated realistic and believable animal locomotion beautifully.

His draughtsmanship is top notch. The following pages show that he was able to sketch complex animal poses with great ease. Frank and Ollie said that his Vis. Dev. work on "Bambi" was invaluable for everybody.

The last three images are examples of how he handled deer anatomy and motion for that film. 

With a touch of poetry, if you ask me.

Bernard Garbutt Animal Sketches

Here are a few pages from Garbutt’s animal sketchbook, around 1940. I love his approach to drawing, he goes right for the essence of the animal. It doesn’t matter wether he is observing a mammal, a bird or a reptile, he tells you something that’s characteristic about this specific animal.

This kind of work makes me want to run to the LA zoo and sketch.

Disney was very lucky to have Garbutt as a teacher for animal drawing during animation’s golden age. With a project like Bambi in the works, these solid but lively sketches influenced the whole crew who worked on that film.

Find out more about about Bernard Garbutt in this earlier post:

http://andreasdeja.blogspot.com/search?q=garbutt

Bambi Sketches

Some wonderful deer studies have been offered on Ebay recently. They were all produced during animal drawing classes at Disney in preparation for Bambi. The teacher was Bernard Garbutt (who I utterly admire as a first class animal expert.)
Some of these look like Garbutt's own work, others could be by animators in the classroom.
I recall vividly how Frank Thomas described his frustration when Walt Disney asked for unprecedented realism for the animation in Bambi.
"You look at a real deer who's body is full of bumps, bones and muscles...how on earth were we going to animate all that?"

Everybody learned a ton in Garbutt's classes, and when Marc Davis stepped in with his realistic, yet cartoony story sketches, the vision for Bambi's animation became clear.

More on Garbutt in this previous post. Sheer genius!

http://andreasdeja.blogspot.com/2012/02/bernard-garbutt.html

Bernard Garbutt Cows

Cows are a lot of fun to draw. It is fascinating to watch their "boney" anatomical structure in motion. The hip bones alone are so unique and great to analyze. These wonderful sketches are are by Bernard Garbutt, who worked at Disney as a an animal drawing instructor for a few years during the Golden Age of Animation. I love these pages from his sketchbook because of the loose quality combined with astute observation.

Makes me want to visit a farm and do my own cow life drawings.

 

Here's a link to a previous post on Garbutt's art:

https://andreasdeja.blogspot.com/2012/02/bernard-garbutt.html

Bernard Garbutt Bird Sketches

Disney animal expert Bernard Garbutt has a sensational sense for observation. There isn't a creature he couldn't draw well. Here are pages from his sketchbook showing a variety of birds, sketched at a country fair in the early 1940s. This stuff is soo good!

More on Garbutt here:

http://andreasdeja.blogspot.com/2012/02/bernard-garbutt.html