A former animator is bringing a touch of Disney magic to card games. Tania Walker talks monsters, ladies and why every drawing counts

LIONS, TIGERS AND DRACULA

Words by Matt Jarvis

The art style of Dracula’s Feast was inspired by gothic illustrator Edward Gorey

For many artists, a job at Disney would be their ‘happily ever after’. For Tania Walker, it was just her ‘Once upon a time…’ After stints at animation studios – where she worked on a Coco Pops advert and the sequel to George of the Jungle – the Australian illustrator joined Walt Disney’s Sydney studio in the mid-noughties as an assistant animator, racking up credits on films such as The Lion King 3 and Mickey, Donald, Goofy: The Three Musketeers. Part of her role was to work as an ‘inbetweener’, the industry term for artists that produce the drawings that go between the key poses drawn by lead animators, giving the impression of movement and action.

“The principles of what makes a good drawing are the same from job to job – everything else is different,” Walker says. “At Disney I worked in pencil on paper, colour wasn’t a factor and I had to meet a quota of roughly 60 drawings per week. In a studio environment like that, each person is like a single component in a much larger machine: you do one thing over and over again, and you do it extremely well. That applies to all animation jobs, but at Disney they had it down to a science.”

Following her stint at Disney, Walker decided to focus on illustration and spent a decade working on everything from advertising to toy and novelty design. Eventually, she would come into contact with local fledgling tabletop studio Jellybean Games. It was an opportunity she jumped at.