Haunted Mansion at 50

 Today, Disneyland’s famous spook house attraction, Haunted Mansion, celebrates the 50th anniversary of welcoming the public to visit its 999 happy haunts.

Pencil draft stage, carmine red pencil on paper.
21.6 cm x 27.9 cm (8.50 in. x 11.00 in.)

The attraction features a pair of opera singers, although I chose to only depict the female member. In the original vignette, conceived by Disney Imagineer Marc Davis, her male companion stands on her left side and is thin, wearing a stage costume version of nordic/viking armor. Her long, left braid is draped over her companion’s chest and over his far shoulder.

Ink stage, black ink and carmine red pencil on paper.
21.6 cm x 27.9 cm (8.50 in. x 11.00 in.)

The classic attraction has many vignettes and characters that are well-known even to casual Disney fans who have yet to make their first visits to a Disney Park. The trio of hitchhiking ghosts may be the most well-known. I choose for this anniversary tribute something a bit less well-known and then for simplicity to only depict half of the couple. To make her appear more ghostly, I drew her lower body transition to wispy, smoky trials. This is a departure from the look of the Mansion’s ghosts both from the audio-animatronic versions of the attraction and from the Marc Davis concepts.

Typhoon Lagoon at 30

The Walt Disney World water park, Typhoon Lagoon, marks its 30th anniversary today.

Before a Google image search resulted in a scant few images of this red-orange alligator, I was only familiar with the blue-green mascot for Blizzard Beach. In saying so, I reveal that this is the first time that I’ve drawn the surfing reptile, and I’ll probably not have any reason in the future to drawn him again. At least not in the next 10 years before the 40th anniversary.

The differences in the sketch/ construction stage and the inked stage don’t reveal much beyond the shading decisions made on the inked stage. The hidden Mickey is a bit more pronounced in the sketch however.

The drawing was done nearly a full month before the digital coloring stage. Despite it not being a relatively long amount of passed time, it’s enough that I can’t recall if positioning the surfboard curving off the enveloping circle was intentional creating a sort of “9” shape. I think that I just pushed the surf-gator down and right to clear room for the park’s stranded boat icon. Intentional or not the result is that it connects the two, leading the eye from the surfboard counter-clockwise around the circle to the boat and “30” water spout.