Painting Fine-Art Cartoons in Oils - Enchanted Images

Barks’s cartoon paintings.
The history of Barks’s work,
both comic-book stories and
oil paintings, is the history of
making fantasy into reality.
For Barks’s cartoon
paintings “realism” doesn’t
refer to his choice of subject
matter but to specific
techniques for achieving
authenticity, using research
and reference material to
correctly render light and
shadow, surface and form.
Looking at the examples
below, it’s obvious that the
duck figure in “Oblivious”
is not realistic in the same
way “Tundra Swan” is –
the figure in “Oblivious”
is a cartoon character, not
a real duck. But the craft
used to create a Barks-style
painting – the rendering
techniques – are the same
for both. When Barks first
began to experiment with this
style he said: “I’m going to do
away with the outline on the
ducks. They won’t look like
colored cartoons; I’m going
to see if I can’t make them
look like real, round ducks.’
I wouldn’t draw outlines if
I were painting a bunch of
sailors; I would draw them
with colors. And I did that
with the ducks” (CBC, 139).
The ducks might be cartoon
characters, but Barks painted
them as if they were solid,
three-dimensional beings,
defined by light and shadow.
Compare Barks’s paintings to
the Mickey Mouse paintings
by Floyd Gottfredson or even
the Uncle Scrooge storybook
paintings by Norman
McGary to see the difference
1. 2.
3.
4. 5. 6.
146
Detail from Uncle Scrooge: The Lemonade
King, by Norman McGary. Barks provided
drawings for McGary’s paintings, which
have a very illustrated look to them, unlike
Barks’s more realistic style.
in approach. Barks’s
technique was a hyperstylized
realism that brought
the real world’s appearance,
physics and history into his
cartoon world. Skies, clouds,
waves, rocks, grass, saloons,
mountains, gold, jewels –
anything you could find in
Six ways to see a
duck.
1. Photography: Photo
of a duck.
2. Romanticism: Detail
from “Mallard Ducks
and Ducklings on a
River Bank” by John
Frederick Herring, Sr.
3. Impressionism:
Detail from the oil
painting “Five Ducks
in a Pond” by William
Koester.
4. Photorealism:
Detail from the acrylic
painting “Tundra
Swan” by Peter Mathios,
2009.
5. Modernism: Detail
from the oil painting
“Look Mickey” by Roy
Lichtenstein, 1961.
6. Imaginative realism:
Detail from my oil
painting “Oblivious”
(7-2006).