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.