Dumbo Magazine holiday cover by Pepe Ferre

As a proud Disney fan, I’ve neglected my Disney gallery for far too long. So we’re going full throttle Disney for this next stretch of postings. If you’re not big Disney fans, you can probably skip the next 6-7 weeks. But I’m hoping you stick around anyways. We’re in a pandemic. What else have you got to do? LOL!

Jose Ramon Ferre Elies was a Catalan artist who passed away in 2018 (you can Google Catalonia if you want to know where that is). Known professionally as Pepe Ferre, he was born in a small town near Tarragona, Spain and later moved to Barcelona to pursue art (Tarragona and Barcelona are two of the 4 provinces in northeastern Spain that make up the region of Catalonia). For most of his, almost, 50-year career (beginning in the early 70’s), Ferre was associated with Disney, doing European comic and licensing work for various studios and publishers in Spain, Italy, and Germany (often as Art Director or Creative Director).

As per Anthony's site description, this wonderful pencil illustration was done for a 1989 cover of Dumbo Magazine. It’s a beautiful drawing of Bambi, that also features Thumper along with Chip & Dale. Based on the theme, I’m guessing it was a holiday cover. Because the piece was a little too wide for my scanner, and because the upper third of the page was blank anyway (with no logo), I initially decided to shoot it horizontally to capture and entire image area, and just crop the blank top portion. But ultimately, I just stuck to the vertical scan, although it shaves about a quarter inch on both sides. I think aesthetically, it works better the way it was formatted to be used. Please forgive any blemishes or weird patches in the image. Those were probably caused by my tinkering with the settings in an attempt to accentuate the pencil lines. I really love this multi-character image, but I did find it a bit odd that Dumbo himself would not appear on a magazine entitled Dumbo Magazine. Ha! I ran a few web searches hoping for a picture of the published cover, but no such luck. I did find various other covers, and all featuring Dumbo. Hopefully, there’s an even more devoted Disney fan out there who will spot this and have a copy of the magazine (or even just a picture of the published cover).

Anyway, my thanks to Anthony and the rest of his efficient, hardworking crew at Camp Snyder. I think I’ve picked up more art from Anthony’s site this past year, than almost anywhere else. And I have to say, the communication and efficiency of his staff is second to none. I put something in my cart, send in the purchase request, and I usually have a response in minutes. One click of the payment link and the transaction is done. Next thing I know, I have a shipping notification. And about 2 days later, the art is on my doorstep. For someone who hates (and I mean HATES) to wait, it couldn’t be any easier. So big thanks to everyone there!