What’s this? What’s this?
Something’s shining and glowing around the dark-night air! Oh, I know who it is! Why, it’s our favorite ghost dog, Zero from Tim Burton’s stop-motion animated classic The Nightmare Before Christmas.
The story, the characters, the settings, the music, and the songs, thanks to the work by Danny Elfman, you’ve got all the key elements from Tim Burton to create one of the most beautiful, stylized films in the world of animation. On this topic, I am so happy and so excited to share you my fan art drawings of Jack Skellington’s faithful ghost dog, Zero. This is definitely one of my best fan art drawings, and one of my favorite drawings I ever worked on. Once again, can’t wait to share it with you! 😀
I loved this movie growing up as a kid. I have never saw it in the theaters when it first came out, because I wasn’t born yet. It’s funny because I was born the same year as Disney’s The Lion King came out, back in 1994. However, the first time I saw The Nightmare Before Christmas was from watching on the VHS for the first time, and I absolutely loved it! I think I was probably about…I’d say around 5 to 6 years old…pretty close, let’s go with it. For me, I think it was the first Tim Burton movie I ever watch as a kid, way before I saw other of Burton’s movies, such as Beetlejuice (1988), Sleepy Hollow (1999), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), and Corpse Bride (2005) – another beautiful stop-motion animated movie to watch every Halloween. As a child, I believed I was super amazed by the look of the film; the characters were so memorable to me, the music and songs by Danny Elfman were so iconic, and the dark-tone animation style by Burton was so unique and abstracted. Jack Skellington, the main hero, became my favorite character. Of course, I also love Zero! Zero is just so super cute, and he’s one of my top favorite Disney Dogs, along with Lady from Lady and the Tramp (1995) and Copper from The Fox and the Hound (1981).
Tim Burton, to me, he’s definitely one of my favorite directors of all time, besides growing up watching his films, either it’s animation or live-action, and he’s also one of my favorite animation legends. When you think of Tim Burton, all you think of is one of the animation heroes and legends, even though he would do live-action movies. From the way I’ve seen from watching this movie growing up, this is definitely a masterpiece and has a special place close to my heart.
Well, now that I just shared you my experience on this movie, let’s go talk about the Zero drawings. Plus, this is gonna sound like a spoiler alert, but here’s a special bonus announcement. I am officially working on my Nightmare Before Christmas fan art for Halloween. It will featured Jack and Zero together, setting in the cemetery with the iconic spiral hill, the same setting where Jack sings his melancholy song ‘Jack’s Lament’. Boy, talk about heartbreaker! Don’t worry, Jack…we all felt for you!
Zero Drawings (SketchBook)
Here is my drawing sketches for Zero from last week ago, drawn on SketchBook. I tell you, I love using this software, because not only you get to learn how to draw and paint beautiful artwork in 2D form, but you can also move the drawings around, shrinking it into small or enlarging it into a large-sized drawing. For animating drawings, it’s also very helpful to me, when it comes to do few bits of animation tests. You can move the character and fix it to a right pose to make the drawing moving more realistically. With Zero, he is basically simple easy and fun to draw. You started with the circle base for his head, large dark ovals for eyes, his mouth was slightly curvy, his jack-o’-lantern nose was a little circle, and his ghostly body was very wavy and floating like a cloth.
For the full-length drawing, this actually came from the first Zero pencil drawing of the model sheet I created it. Surprisingly enough, I worked on it since yesterday, and it was fun. It’s the same drawing from the model sheet, but I saved another copy of it to enlarge the first drawing, adding a full-black background with a large ball of light in the colors of gray and white, cleaning up the drawing, and paint Zero in color, including adding glowing effect around him and his cute, little jack-o’-lantern nose. After working on it, I was being super geeky with this drawing that I just fell in love with it! It was super amazing.
Like I said, with my special announcement delivering this blog, I will be working on a special Halloween fan art project. Unfortunately, I can’t show you the sketch right now, but whenever the fan art drawing is done and I’ll be posting it on this blog, you’ll have a chance to see it. With these Zero drawings I did, this will be helpful to use as a guide. Of course, I actually did a pencil drawing sketch on paper and pencil of Jack and Zero at the cemetery from last Thursday night, but the way I look at it, it looks great and all; however, there were some elements that might need to be fix, mostly on how I draw Zero. So, with these drawings, this helped me how to draw this character a little bit better, just like in the movie. Sometimes, you can’t help but resisting how Zero is just a very cute ghost dog, and he will always be around with Jack anywhere he goes to keep him happy.
Of course, like the rest of the dogs, Zero would do anything for a playful game of fetch with one of Jack’s ribs. Anyhow, please feel free to check it out my official Zero fan art drawings down below. I can’t wait to get this project done, and I’m very excited to share it you. Hopefully, this would make a great tribute to Tim Burton, for creating one of his stunning and iconic animated films of all time.
Drawings:
The Autistic Animator's Desk 
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