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Home > Archive > Feb 7, 2008

St. George Artist Christine Blum Knows the ‘King’
By Ellie Lambert
Hank, Peggy, and Bobby Hill – familiar characters that hit home with a lot of folks. Hank Hill is a hardworking middle-class American who loves his wife and tries to raise his son right. With an interesting cast of neighbors, friends, and business associates, “King of the Hill” is a staple on prime time TV.
Enter Christine Blum, a resident of St. George, who helped bring the Hill family to life with pen and ink.
“Working on ‘King of the Hill’ was really a fun job,” said Blum. “I worked on the show for eight years prior to coming to St. George, and even though the animation process can take up many hours and get tedious at times, it was very rewarding, as it allowed me to be creative.”
Blum had a hand in three different aspects of the show.
“I worked on storyboards, character layouts, and exposure sheets. Character layouts is where you plot the movements of the characters. If Hank sits down in a chair, I would draw him standing up and sitting down. That bit of animation would then get sent to our facility in Korea, where the animators there would do the fill-in, the motions of him getting from standing to sitting. There is a lot of drawing that goes into that one small move.”
Writing exposure sheets, she explained, tells the animators how to time the animation, as in who goes where and when.
“Storyboarding, for me, was really the most fun,” Blum said. “It allowed me to be the most creative, and I really, really enjoyed that. It was a good show to work on, and I was happy to be part of it.”
Prior to working on King of the Hill, Blum worked at Disney for 10 years, and at Warner Brothers for a year.
“I worked on several Disney features: Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, Lion King, Little Mermaid. It wasn’t as much fun, however, as working on King of the Hill,” Blum said.
Blum’s role in those features was as an Effects Animator.
“I was responsible for drawing such things as water, fire, shadows – it was pretty dull.”
Blum was accepted into a storyboard-training program at Disney, which she did for one year.
“It was at about that time when they told me I didn’t have what it took to be a Disney storyboard artist. I was so relieved!”
Along came King of the Hill.
“That was pretty much how I got my start there,” said Blum. “I was much happier having a creative job in television than a not-creative job on a feature, even though television is a lot of work. There is so much drawing that goes into it, and as I said, it can be very tedious. For example, when I was a student at CalArts, I worked for two years and ended up with a three-minute film. That was a lot of work!”
With the advent of computer-generated animation, said Blum, a lot of animators lost work.
“When the studios decided to go the way of computer animation, they didn’t take the animators and say, ‘Come on now, all you people who draw, we’re going to train you on computers now!’ Instead they hired people who knew how to use computers, and laid a lot of people off.”
Some were able to make the transition to computers, said Blum, but a lot of others didn’t.
“Television worked out better because they haven’t gone totally computer yet. That allows work for people who draw,” she said.
After her work on “King of the Hill,” Blum and her husband decided it was time to leave Los Angeles.
“The crime, the smog – we just got tired of it. We decided to cash in on the housing boom and moved here three and a half years ago. My husband, who also went to CalArts, used to drive through St. George on his way home to Philadelphia. He really liked the scenery and the small-town feel, so he kept his eye on it as a place to retire.”
In the time since her ‘retirement,’ Blum has considered illustrating children’s books and has been working on a greeting-card portfolio – and finds it a tight market to get into.
“They pretty much don’t accept submissions from freelancers. The big guys have their own in-house artists, but there are smaller companies that are open to the kind of work I do.”
Going from a full-time job to a self-employed entrepreneur has had its drawbacks.
“I was so used to getting up and going to work for someone else every day, and having the camaraderie of my friends in the workplace. Some days,” she said, “I’ve gotten up and felt lost because of the transition. I am getting better at it, though. It wasn’t easy at first, but I have to remember that doing what I’m doing now is all I ever thought about when I was working. Now I’m able to do what I want to, and being my own boss is just something new to get used to.”
Blum referred to a recent article in the Dixie Weekly News about Del Parsons.
“I cut it out and taped it up next to my drawing desk. It said, ‘As an artist, I believe I’m always in the mood to paint. If I was waiting for the mood, I’d never paint. You just have to do it.’ I knew that when I was working for an employer, but I’d sort of forgotten it being on my own! So now I just sit down and work whether I like it or not.”
Blum admits that her dream job is to be a political cartoonist. I really enjoy doing that. I’ve done a few here locally and am now doing some that are more in line with what’s going on with the presidential elections.”
Blum’s advice for would-be animators?
“Learn computers. It helps if you know how to draw, but computers are the way of animation.”

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