Wednesday, March 9, 2016

Rico Lebrun



Within the animation community Rico Lebrun is mostly known for his teaching stint at Disney during the pre-production phase of Bambi. In the photo you can see him giving a life drawing class featuring a deer as a model. Seated behind him are animators Frank Thomas and Retta Scott.
His incredibly analytical motion studies of deer became an important cornerstone in the development of realistic, but "animatable" characters for the film.
When I saw these sheets below for the first time, I felt like lightbulbs were going off in my head.
Lebrun shows you the immense motion range of a deer as well as possibilities for entertainment.






Lebrun was born in Naples, Italy in 1900, he died in Malibu, California in 1964. For a while he was a commercial artist on New York, later he taught at Chouinard Art Institute in LA, where Disney found him.






His later work (which includes murals and sculptures) became much more abstract and dealt thematically with human suffering, which he must have seen plenty of as a soldier in the Italian Army during WW I.




6 comments:

  1. Wonderful post, great to see his personal art. Thanks!

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  2. Andreas you know some cheerleader woman?

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  3. Hi Mr. Deja I'm a huge fan of yours and I admit I've been hunting around on the internet for any kind of email address to contact you... but I think this will be my best bet!
    Scar is one of my favourite characters ever and recently I decided to redraw him in a kind of semi-realistic style. Here's the link to the drawing http://qvercast.deviantart.com/art/Scar-Redraw-2016-edition-585758081
    but I also made a speedpaint video just to document my progress as I'm including this and a few other pieces in my body of work for my Major BOW as I'm in my final year of highschool!
    I hope you read this, even if I don't get a reply I hope you enjoyed my little tribute to you and your amazing character!

    -Sophia xx

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  4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9w9h9AcK-D4

    oh man sorry, here's the link to the speedpaint ...whoops :(

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  5. That woman with the hand on her knees is amazing!!

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