Mike Royer
Mike Royer
Michael W. "Mike" Royer is an comic book artist and inker, best known for his work with pencilers Russ Manning and Jack Kirby. In later life Royer became a freelance product designer and character artist for The Walt Disney Company...
friday art monday
I remember on a Friday afternoon getting a phone call from Grant Simmons saying, "Mike," we got to be pretty good friends; "Mike, the Sheriff is closing us down on Monday. If you'd like to drive into the studio tomorrow morning, you can have anything you want." So rather than go in and take home piles and piles of cels of Spider-Man what did I take home? Two pages of original art that got sent out to the west coast. Now of course if I'd have taken all the rest of that stuff home I could probably have retired a lot earlier.
book artist talking
I've been very lucky with the people I've met over the years. Way back in the early '70s I went to [Phil] Seuling's conventions for something like three years in a row from '70 to '72 and I remember at the '72 luncheon with the Academy of Comic Book Artists and talking with John Romita about the kind of brushes he used. Pros ask pros the same questions that fans do. "What kind of pens do you use? What kind of brushes do you use?" I was so amazed that the wonderful work John Romita was doing was accomplished with a Windsor-Newton series 7 Number 4. Not a 2 or a 3, but a 4.
art years want
If I wanted to own some Jack Kirby original art unless it was something that Giacoia or Sinnott had inked I was too close to it. I didn't want to collect his pages inked by me. Of course 40 years later I'd LOVE to have some of that stuff.
running art stores
I still have a lot my Disney store art left and if I ever run out I'll just redraw it, because it will still be my original art and as a freelancer I own it.
artist people sitting
I know some stories about "liberation" and stuff that's been liberated by people who turn around and get on their soapbox about how it's unfair that the artists didn't benefit while they're sitting on stuff that they "liberated," but that's another story for another time.
art years people
Why are other people profiting off that? I can see that if I have the page and sold it for $50 and 20 years later somebody's got it for $200, okay. That's business. But I had no say in that art being out there. It just really burns me.
art character drawing
When I was at Disney and was a character art manager and handing out artwork that had to be inked we had a thing where if there was any lettering on it I'd hear, "I don't letter," and I said, "Look at it. It's drawing. Ink the drawing." I just learned from Mike Aarons how each letter was just part of the drawing.
art book bridges
I went into Hollywood and met Mike Aarons and went to Grantray-Lawrence Animation to work on the, by today's standards, extremely cheap and crude Marvel superheroes cartoons which basically consisted of taking stacks of the comic book art, taking parts of the art, pasting it down, extending it down into drawings and occasionally a new piece of art to bridge the comic book panels and limited animation and lip movement.
new-york artist years
I sometimes look at the careers of other... I guess I could call them contemporaries or maybe close artists; you know, the 4 or 5 guys who go to New York City and get a loft and work together and use each other as models and that sort of thing and wait for years and years to get married. Maybe I just wasn't that definite.
art school paris
It was just too hard from my standpoint to apply myself properly for the lessons from art school and also work 6 hours a day at the Ben Paris restaurant in downtown Seattle. There was just no time to have a life.
art morning coffee
Every morning I'd have coffee with my wife and we would discuss ideas. Sixty percent of what I did for the stores was concepts. The other forty percent was correcting and cleaning up other concepts in house, or doing final art on my concepts. Most of my concepts were so finished they could turn them over to somebody else.
art mean thinking
When you talk about state of the art, that doesn't mean a damn thing. Think about it. State of the art. "This is the state of the art brush from Winsor-Newton." Yeah, but the state of the art sucks rubber donkey lungs.
summer art real
I went to art school for about a year. I was born and raised in the Willamette Valley in Oregon into a middle-class family who didn't have the funds to say, "Here, kid. Here's your money for school." So I worked real hard during the summer and saved money and was able to go to school for a year and borrowed a little money which I paid back after that first year.
felt free held hit missed opportunity three tie tough
We felt comfortable with the game, then (Bailey) hit a three to get it back to three, and we missed our free throws. They had an opportunity to tie it, but we held on in a tough place to play.