Featured Artist: Orville Wilson

Learn about the artist and the inspiration behind a new Disney ornament that had jaws dropping when first previewed at a couple of the 2012 artist signing events.

Ever since Orville was in grade school, he wanted to be an artist. Because his mother liked to draw, she encouraged him to pursue a career in art. While in high school, he always participated in art fairs with his drawings and paintings.

After college, he held a variety of design jobs ranging from working for a screen print company to one that produced sports trading cards—all of which prepared him for a job at Hallmark. He started his career at Hallmark in season cards, but was always interested in Keepsake 3—D designing and was happy to be selected to work with this group.

Outside of work, he enjoys travel, martial arts (Kung Fu) and video gaming. Not surprisingly, one of his favorite ornaments that he has worked on was based on the Pac-Man® arcade game which he always loved playing!

Cinderella’s Castle (2013)

“Everything I do, even sculpting, is on the computer. I do some animation here and there, so I got to create the animation for the light up effects on this ornament. I had to watch Disney’s opening scene with the fireworks display over and over again and I got to look at some of the old Walt Disney cartoons, too. It brought back some good memories from when I was a little kid. This ornament was especially fun to show off during signing event sneak peeks. I asked, ‘any Disney fans out there?’ The Keepsake fans got all excited, I hit the button and when I played it you could just see their jaws drop! The fireworks display goes off with the sound, so it’s really cool.”

Wagon Queen Family Truckster (2013)
National Lampoon’s Vacation

“This ornament shows one of the funniest scenes of National Lampoon’s Vacation, but I can’t believe that I was allowed to keep the aunt on the top of the station wagon! There’s a guy here in town that has a replica of the car from the movie, so I actually went out and took pictures of his car for reference. Some of the actors from the film had signed the glove box, so it was pretty cool to get to see that in person. I looked at those photographs for all the little details of the car. I’ve done all the National Lampoon ornaments from the past few years. This year’s plays ‘Holiday Road,’ the theme song from the movie. I have all the National Lampoon movies and I’m a big fan.”