03-03-2019, 06:33 PM
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#1
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Team Blue Boy
Join Date: Jun 2014
Location: U.S., East Coast
Posts: 15,260
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Hall of Famer boxer -- and TMNT cel artist -- Deirdre Gogarty
Saw this neat article. Anyone knowingly have any of her work?
https://www.theadvertiser.com/story/...on/3040113002/
Quote:
Hall of Famer boxer Deirdre Gogarty's past? Working with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
Evan Barnes, Lafayette Daily Advertiser Published 2:51 p.m. CT March 3, 2019
Deirdre Gogarty unzipped the large portfolio she brought into Ragin Cajun Boxing Club.
She flipped through several of the pencil drawings she had done over the years. A tribute to Queen frontman Freddie Mercury. A series of images of her trainer Beau Williford.
Then she reached a panel that featured images familiar to kids who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s. Four creatures named Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael and Donatello.
It’s a life that few of her trainees know. Before she became a world champion boxer and an inductee in the Women’s International Boxing Hall of Fame, she was part of the animation team for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon series that became a worldwide phenomenon.
“At the time I was doing it, I had no clue it was going to be so big. I never saw the comic strip and didn’t know much about it all,” Gogarty said. “It seemed kind of weird to me that they’d pick turtles of all things to be comic strip heroes.”
How Gogarty got on the show
Gogarty always had dreams of being a boxer but with little money in it growing up in Ireland, art helped her sustain a living. She had always sketched as a child and after school, she found her way to the Fitzwilliam Institute in Dublin.
She was taking a course in graphic design when one day animator Jimmy Murakami came by her school looking for people to hire. He selected Gogarty and several others to be part of a new animated series he was developing with partner Fred Wolf.
“Animation was huge in Ireland at the time,” Gogarty said. “There were three animation companies just in Dublin alone.”
She began working on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as a cel painter where she painted the characters after they were already drawn. Then she settled into a role as an inbetweener – an artist that draws intermediate frames between two images that shows fluid movement.
“If the character starts picking up a sword and the end scene is throwing it, you’re doing all the movement in between the frames per second,” Gogarty said.
Each episode took months to develop – Gogarty said the first episode took three months from start to finish – but it helped her sustain a living while she spent her nights training the gym.
Since boxing was her ultimate goal, she remained unaware that the show became a huge hit and spawned movies, video games and action figures. She recalled playing the arcade game with several co-workers but had no idea that kids were falling in love with the characters she worked with.
“Maybe because we didn’t have the Internet back then and Irish television was so limited,” Gogarty said. “I didn’t realize the huge exposure it was having and I didn’t really know any young kids.”
Several of her colleagues made extra money by painting extra cels and selling them on the street back in Dublin. For her? She paint cels and give them away for free, not knowing how coveted they’d be to the average fan.
“Art was more a means to an end,” Gogarty said. “I’m sure glad I had that balance because if I was just depending on the paychecks from boxing, I would’ve starved to death.
Boxing career takes off
While working for Murakami-Wolf-Dublin, she also did inbetweening for another 1990s cartoon in “James Bond Jr.” But she mostly worked on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles until she moved to Lafayette in January 1993.
Her boxing career took off once she met Williford. She faced off in a memorable fight with fellow Hall of Famer Christy Martin in 1996 and although she lost, Gogarty won her next eight matches and became the world featherweight champion in 1997.
Even then, her past life as an artist was hard to escape. When she visited schools to talk about boxing, kids were more curious about her drawing Ninja Turtles characters.
“I didn’t realize how cool it was at the time but I realize now,” said Gogarty.
Now as she trains younger fighters, her reputation remains solely in the ring. Ask her to draw a character on the spot and she’ll laugh and say she’s out of practice.
But there’s still reminders of her past lingering around Ragin Cajun Boxing Club. Williford has Gogarty’s portrait of him hanging next to several magazine covers from her boxing career. For this weekend’s Louisiana State Golden Gloves competition, she designed the poster with Mardi Gras colors.
When Gogarty’s son came by the gym this past week, he carried a sandwich case next to his video games. The case’s design? The face of Michelangelo, the goofiest of the Ninja Turtles.
She said her son was too young to start watching the show’s newest incarnations on Nickelodeon. But someday, she figured he’ll get curious and discover his mother was more than just a world champion boxer.
Gogarty, however, expects her son to have a different reaction to the show than she did.
“I’m sure he’ll get into it when he starts seeing it,” Gogarty said.
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