Barks' comments:
There is a wealth of
detail as well as gold in the painting. You're
not looking head on into that mirror, you always
see everything at a 45-degree angle from the line
at which you look into it. Out there behind them
is this window with snow on the sill, all in cold
colors.
Inside, in the warm
saloon, I tried to make the bottles look like the
old whisky bottles of that era. The brass
spittoon and the brass rail, the picks and the
gold pans, the kerosene lamp; those are things
that had to be figured out and made authentic for
the period of time. The hobnail boots, for
example. It's typical of the drunks of that
period that they'd drink themselves into such a
stupor that they'd fall on the floor.
The other characters
follow the standard Disney convention and are
dogs or pigs rather than ducks. For one thing,
there's no mistaking a duck. When he's with a dog-faced
guy, there's no resemblance between him and the
outsiders. So I kept the ducks pretty much
straight and the outsiders were all dog faces.
When you come to think
of it, if you use a horse face, the guy doesn't
resemble a human in any way any more. Goat faces
and so on are about as far as you can go. Rat
faces, too. But the dog faces and pig faces, they
looked a little bit like human faces; that is,
you could caricature them as human. I always
liked 'The Goose Egg Nugget' very much - it told
its own story.
|
