THEMINIATUREPAINTINGS

Carl Barks produced many more paintings than generally believed! It is not unusual for some painting artists to produce series of smaller paintings with the purpose of trying out certain ideas, colourings, and compositions, but those studies are rarely published - or publishable for that matter. A painting artist generally likes to be thought of as more or less infallible, so only finished and approved works find their way to the public.
Fans and connoisseurs of Barks' paintings - especially the Disney duck ones! - know his official paintings and this is to some extent also true when it comes to his non-Disney paintings. This website has several pages covering these vast groups of material (see The Paintings and The Painting Payments as examples), and you can also find several pages on this website showing how Barks worked on his paintings.

During the Disney painting years Barks made several almost identical series of paintings, where the main differences lie with alternating background colours. Well known examples are his artwork featuring the Money Lake, Ancient Persia, and Bullet Valley, but there is a category of genuine practice paintings as well. This page presents you to some of these studies that Barks never booked, numbered, or titled.
It lies, of course, within the concept that not many of these practice paintings have ever come to the public's attention, but you are now presented to all the known 7 miniature practice paintings Barks made of Scrooge McDuck during his Disney painting inception.

THE INCEPTION

Barks made this quick situation sketch in 1971 when he began painting the ducks. His wife is not impressed...

In 1971, when Barks obtained his first licence from The Walt Disney Company to produce duck oil paintings, he 'warmed up' by painting a handful of small oils featuring a stern looking Uncle Scrooge grasping a bag of money. These small portraits primarily served as pure practice paintings enabling Barks to decide on how to deal with a number of details and potential problems.

Board:
Barks experimented with both canvas (but made only 12 duck paintings on canvas) and Masonite. He preferred the latter due to its stable and smooth surface that enabled more precise details. A contributing reason for the decision might have been that Barks found out that he could buy 100" (2,5m) lengths of narrow Masonite boards at the local hardware store at cheap prices. Then it was easy for him to divide them into the desired board sizes!

Colour:
Barks experimented with oil and acrylic. Both had benefits; oil would dry slowly thus enabling Barks to make corrections using for example a cloth, while acrylic would dry up more quickly enabling Barks to work at a more rapid pace. The small paintings were used as an experimental media, but as acrylic paint tended to have more unwanted glare he soon decided to go for oil.
Barks (excerpts from several interviews): I prefer to paint in oil, acrylics dry too fast - With oil you can go back after three to four hours - With acrylics you get color variations - I use small brushes for coins, bills, and buttons - Oil makes the coins look lush.

Character appearance:
One of the first obstacles Barks encountered character-wise was the difference between drawing ducks for a comic book and painting them. In a painting it would not look very appealing having all the black outlines of the ducks present, so now he had to experiment with their skin/feather tones in order not to blend the tones into background elements. Barks soon realized that white-feathered ducks would not work satisfactorily as contrasts would suffer, so he decided to paint the ducks in diverse subdued colours. In the miniatures you can see how Barks experimented with tones from white to yellow.
Barks: I'm going to do away with the outline on the ducks. They won't look like colored cartoons; I'm going to see if I can't make them look like real, round ducks. I wouldn't draw outlines if I was painting a bunch of sailors - I would draw them with colors. And I did that with the ducks.
Barks: I was experimenting with ways to take those white ducks and make them look round. I gave them a shadowed side and a lighted side, and still I had the same problem: They are little devils to paint. It was hard to put personality into their shape, which was basically that of a round ball.
Barks' wife Garé told a story of when he first wanted to start painting the ducks: He got out a Ping-Pong ball, attached a string to it, and studied it under different lighting conditions to figure out how shadows looked on a sphere. It was from studying that Ping-Pong ball that he finally learned how to shade the heads of the ducks. That's the way he approached everything.

THE MINIATURES
Below you are presented to 2 sketches as well as all 7 experimental and unbooked, uncoded, and untitled Scrooge miniatures that were quickly done and given away to friends and business partners such as Donald Ault (Barks expert), Michael Barrier (Barks biographer), and George Sherman (furnisher of the license to paint the Disney ducks). The miniatures were done on Masonite and they are all sized 5x7" (125x180mms). The artworks are, at a glance, almost identical, but if you look closer you will discover a number of differences such as lighting, posture, slightly turned body, skin/feather colours, differently ruffled feathers, sack and cane switched. In one painting Scrooge is seen mirrored and in another he is wearing his hat.
Early sketch	1971	1971
1971	1971	1972
1972	1972	Late sketch