An Interview with Artist Dave Avanzino
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One of Avanzino's pieces for the Pirates of the Caribbean event

LP: When it comes to working with Disney..do you have a concept you go to them with or do they come to you?

DA: They usually give me a theme and then they leave it up to me as to what to create. What I’ve started doing now is just making a sample. When I did the Cinderella piece I did this really nice rendering of that piece with the thread going in and out of the letters. I rendered it as well as I could to show, on a flat piece of paper, that it was dimensional. That successfully sold the piece to them and they ordered some. But I’ll always remember when I showed them the final piece they said, “Oh, that’s what you meant.” I realized right then that no matter how much time I spend drawing it, it would never communicate the way the dimensional piece actually would. And that way they also have something to walk into a meeting with that’s a little bit more of an impressive piece than just a drawing. It also helps me to solve some of the issues that will come up in the production later on.

Ursula from the villain's series

LP: Do you coordinate with other artists?

DA: No. I haven’t yet. I did notice on the Villains Event a lot of us used the same Ursula picture. You know because it is such a great one. It is a dead on shot and it has her tentacles. And it is something that is reproduced a lot. I am not someone who draws the characters. I will copy the character. I have to have a reference source. I am not authorized to draw the characters so I find a reference source for whatever pose I need. Sometimes it is going to the DVD - for the Queen of Hearts I couldn’t find any good reference shots where she wasn’t manically hysterical or too happy. So I actually still framed for several minutes until I found something where she was sort of in between looking too nice and looking hysterically mad. I’ll look through the children’s books or the different animation books and find a character head that I want.

The Queen of Heaerts from the villains series

LP: And you actually take the image off of DVD?

DA: Yeah, if I need to I'll do a tracing off the TV, but I usually can find them in books. For each of these (pointing to the Villains) Villains heads, I do a tracing. Then they’re scanned into the computer and scaled. There are actually three or four different pieces for each head. So I have one drawing of all those pieces in its right size and then they are scanned in. So I can print them out each time and then paint on top of that. That way I know that each piece is the same size rather than making an individual drawing each time. I’m doing them like a painted cell. You know, where I’m reproducing the black line art. And then I’m doing the painting over that.