For today’s drawing I followed along with Disney animator Michael Woodside’s Drawing With Woodsy series. I decided to draw Oswald the Lucky Rabbit mainly because tomorrow is Easter Sunday and rabbits are traditionally associated with that holiday.
Oswald the Lucky Rabbit was one of the easier characters I drew because he’s basically a black and white drawing that consists of circles and rubbery lines. Oswald has a pretty interesting history. He was a cartoon character that was originally created by Walt Disney. The series became popular as Disney and his fellow animators churned out the silent movie cartoon shorts. Things were fine for a while until Disney had a major falling out with the distributor he was working for at the time and the distributor not only got rid of him but it maintained all legal ownership of Oswald. Walt Disney created Mickey Mouse during the fallout from that incident.
Oswald the Lucky Rabbit continued to be animated by other people (most notably Walter Lantz, who also created Woody Woodpecker) but Mickey Mouse ultimately became more popular and the Oswald series was pretty much over by the early 1950s. For many years Oswald served as little more than a footnote whenever people discussed the history of animation and/or Walt Disney’s career.
In 2006 the Walt Disney Company managed to purchase the rights to Oswald the Lucky Rabbit from NBC Universal so the rabbit is now officially a Disney character once again. Since then he’s appeared in the Epic Mickey video game series and a couple of new theatrical animation shorts while Disney is focusing on locating and restoring some of the early Oswald shorts.
For the past few days in my Drawings of Easter series I’ve been using the Drawing With Woodsy series on YouTube. I first became aware of this series through my cousin’s postings on Facebook. (Michael Woodside’s uncle is married to one of my first cousins.) He will be continuing with his series as long as most of the U.S. remains under a stay-at-home order. For the latest videos, I suggest subscribing to his YouTube channel or following him on Instagram (where he frequently announces when he will put up his next video online).
Tomorrow I plan on ending my Drawings of Easter series with a drawing based on my own original idea, which will tie in with both Easter Sunday and current events.
In the meantime if you want to take a stab at drawing Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, you can check out the YouTube video that I used.
Sagittarius Dolly 