GIANT ART SALE! Was £620 SAVE £186 Now £434Artist: Carl Barks
(biography)Medium: Numbered Limited edition Lithograph print on Acid-free Paper
Size: 7" x 9" (178mm x 229mm)
Date: 1994
Signature: Signed by artist bottom left
This is a Signed Limited edition print."Hi, I'm Donald Duck!" is quite special for a number of reasons. If one were to overlook a faint shakiness from the hand of the Old Duck Man, this image could be blown up to a vertical, twenty-four sheet billboard and the whole world would salute as they passed by, chanting in unison, "This is the definitive Donald Duck! May he live to be six thousand years old!".
When it was duplicated into a fine art bone china porcelain by the masters at Connoisseur of Malvern, an English ceramics studio, the sculptor had to return to his modelling several times just to get the stance and "bone structure" of the duck right: a deceptively difficult task.
Any artist who has tried to draw the duck runs into the same problems. Donald Duck may be anthropomorphic -- talking and acting like a human being -- but, nonetheless, he's a duck… walks like one, originally talked like one (in animation), is built like one and stands like a duck!
Just study the figure closely: notice how the head and neck connect -- not like a man -- and how the legs come out of his feathered torso -- not like a man! Carl Barks' 1950s model sheet of how to draw the duck is the best ever done and is still copied today.
"Hi, I'm Donald Duck!" is in The Fine Art of Walt Disney's Donald Duck, reproduced as Colour Plate #88, Carl Barks' tenth painting of 1975, chronological #101. It was one of only two minis done slightly smaller than 10"x 8" -- painted to make them more affordable to collectors commissioning his work. (Barks carefully calculated time spent doing an oil painting by measuring his work by the square inch. This oil was originally sold -- amazingly, in retrospect -- by the Old Duck Man in 1975 for a mere $150. Today, it's worth at least $25,000 - $30,000!)
Chronology: The painting was published on the title page of the Gladstone comic book, Walt Disney's Comics and Stories #625 (June 1998); plus five Barks pencil concepts for the bone china figurine were reproduced on the Table of Contents page, the figurine itself appearing on the back cover. "Hi, I'm Donald Duck!" was printed by the Black Box of Chicago, image size 8 7/8"x 6 5/8" on 12 1/4"x9 1/2" Opalesque Keramique, a paper constructed of 100% cotton fibre for strength and longevity, guaranteed not to fade under normal and stable storage conditions for hundreds of years. Limited and signed from an edition of 595.
Was £620 SAVE £186 
