From Sketch to Screen

A lonely teenager with scissors for hands, a skeleton who longs to be Santa Claus, and a corpse on her wedding day. These fantastical film characters sprang from the mind of movie director Tim Burton—and they all started in his sketchbook.

It is rare for a film director to create his own drawings, and the art world took note. In 2009, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City gave Burton a solo show. The exhibit was so popular that it went on a worldwide tour. Now Burton is recognized for both his drawings and his films.

Burton attended the California Institute of the Arts, where he studied animation. He learned all aspects of making a film, from designing characters to setting up the perfect shot. These skills landed him a dream job as an animator and storyboard artist at Walt Disney Studios.

At Disney, Burton met fellow animator Rick Heinrichs. Both young men thought that the Disney style of animation was at odds with their personal artistic styles. They decided to work together.

“I’d always been a fan of Tim’s own work,” Heinrichs told Scholastic Art. “I liked how his characters were drawn with an economy of line. I wanted to see them three-dimensional. I took it upon myself to make sculptures of his work.” In 1982, an executive at Disney gave them $60,000 to make a short stop-motion animation film called Vincent. The two artists have since collaborated on Burton’s feature films The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) and Frankenweenie (2012).

Burton’s seemingly simple sketches provide plenty of detail about the visual style of his films. In the sketch of Edward Scissorhands above, Burton uses a variety of ink squiggles and loops to form Edward’s hands and feet. The elongated legs and arms seem out of proportion to his body. And the placement of scissors where his fingers should be challenges our expectations.

The drawing for The Nightmare Before Christmas (at the top of this page) has a similar style. The skeleton Jack’s head is a simple caricature of a skull with large, exaggerated eyes, yet his expression is easy to read. The long lines of Jack’s body complement his slender figure. The muted palette, or colors, creates a dark tone, even on the colorful Sally.

How do Burton’s characters change as they become three-dimensional? What kind of fantastical characters can you create?