WINNIE-THE-POOH

Ex-Disney artist Kim Raymond has been illustrating Disney characters for over 40 years. He began his career in 1978 at The Walt Disney Company in London as a junior artist, and finished it full time in December 2019 as Senior Principal Artist.For the last 7 years he was working directly for the US team in California creating product art for the global direct to retail and licensing market.Separately, he has received international recognition though his work drawing and animating Disney characters for media presence, from guesting on BBC’s Blue Peter with a ‘How to Draw Mickey Mouse’ session to creating animated commercials featuring classic Disney characters for Cath Kidston.In 2019 he created a unique animated celebration featuring E H Shepard’s original Winnie the Pooh (something that had never been animated before) for the birth of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s baby, ‘Archie’. This received massive media coverage from here to Australia. An original watercolour gift he painted for the royal couple resulted in a personal letter of thanks.Following that success, in the Spring of 2021 he created a new 45 second animation of Pooh in celebration of Queen Elizabeth’s 95th birthday, and Winnie the Pooh’s 95th anniversary, which released online in June.And in September 2021 he was consultant on an exclusive collaboration between Disney and AirBnB, an innovative project to recreate Winnie the Pooh’s treehouse in ‘100 Acre Wood’, designing bespoke wallpaper and fabrics that were true to the world of Winnie the Pooh. He has been appointed by Disney as the official host of the ‘BearBnB’ Tree House for the complete anniversary year, which went ‘live’ on 15th September 2021.