Price Check on FUN!!!

My Shop is now open for business..yes it's true. My goal is to update it regularly....of course I also had the goal of running in the Disney World Marathon and that has yet to happen, so we will see how it goes. The intent is there...

Grab your shopping cart or "buggy" has some people here in Texas say, and check out what glorious items await you in My Shop.

Caveman

Here is this weeks DrawerGeeks submission. I went a little more simple this week, trying to go for a cave painting sort of feel.

Sith Apprentice

I haven't watched The Apprentice since season 2; the show become too self aware for my tastes. But if they did a season like this clip, then I would most likely have to tune in again.

Snow White

Here are my contributions to this weeks DrawerGeeks.

Kevin Smith Talks Superman

Someone had sent this to me a couple years ago and I just recently rediscovered it on YouTube.

Back when WB was looking to restart the Superman franchise, Kevin Smith was brought in to write a few drafts. His tale of that experience is not only very funny and very entertaining, but serves as a little window into how movies get made in Hollywood.

And we wonder why Hollywood puts out so much crap? It is about 20 minutes long but SO worth it if you have the time.

WARNING: MATURE LANGUAGE......cover your ears kids.

The Year That Was.....

Happy New Year peoples! Gone is the that wacky year that was 2006.....and I thought 2005 was wacky. Year '05 was riddled with lots of minor bumps in the road as we had a string of minor bad luck. Add in the encounters with the ginormous possum and the mouse in the house , I was more than ready to get to 2006...because 2006 just had to be a better year.

Two major things happened in 2006 both residing on opposite ends of the spectrum. The good: the birth of my son. Yep Lil Pumpkin was the big, bright happy spot of 2006. The bad: losing my job and watching all my friends move all over the place. That was the big "suck" that started in February (when we were first told of the upcoming suckiness) and continued until I started my new job in August. For those of you playing at home that is 6 months of suck.

To cheer me up during the suck months I took in a couple movies, not many, just a few. I don't think I saw a single film this year that I really enjoyed on all levels. Even Pirates and Superman managed to let me down in various ways. The best thing I saw was Walk the Line on DVD and that came out the previous year. To add insult to injury Ant Bully opened and was a financial flop...sigh. So movies were a bummer for me in 2006.

But amid all the gloom of 2006 there was some bright spots. As mentioned Lil Pumpkin is the super nova of 2006. I'm at a new job and really enjoying it, I've made new friends this year as well as keeping in touch with the ol work gang which makes me happy.

In 2006 I also became involved with Animation Mentor which has been a great experience. And I started drawing again thanks to getting involved with Drawer Geeks.

So while it is true some sucktacular things happened in 2006, a lot of good things happened as well...and I didn't die which is always a plus.

Hopefully good things await in 2007.

Counting is Fun....

...until your counter is reset without your knowledge. Yes the good folks at GoStats have updated their site and all that implies. This wouldn't have been a big deal except my counter disappeared off my page due to the code being out of date.

The new code doesn't seem to although me to set the counter and seeing as how I didn't want to start from "1"....new counter it is!!!

I had already been using StatCounter to track page hits within my site. Now it will be my main counter as well. I just wish the numbers could be a little bigger.

Flags

You may have noticed the spiffy country counter that I added over there on the right. My buddy Shephard added one to his blog and by god it looked so cool, I needed to have me one as well.

Right now I'm using the trail version. There is a pay version and a free version. I will see how it goes, but most likely I will plunk down the $17 for a year license.

Oh yeah if you click on a flag it brings up a little map. So if you happen to see, say, Gibraltar, on the list and wonder "where is that?" click on the flag and there ya go.

More First Noel

Yarrow and Carrie Cheney, writers, directors, creators...of The Very First Noel have started a blog. Their first post has a lot of color script paintings from the show as well as other nifty images.

If you are a fan of VFN or if you know nothing about it, why not stop by and check them out.

H.R. Fuss n Stuff

In general things have been going well with Lil Pumpkin. He's a cute little guy. He'll smile and laugh here and there for no apparent reason which is kinda funny. Like he just thought of something amusing.

Wonder-pea is enjoying being a big sister and hasn't been too too jealous of the new person. Although every once and a while she will tell my wife to "put him down"......I mean come....you've been holding him long enough.

However, this past Sunday was one of "those" days. Lil Pumpkin cried pretty much the entire day.....sometimes it was so intense I thought he was going to asplode. It was so bad that at one point I went into the kitchen and stuck my head in the oven. Of course since its not a gas oven I was looking at a bad burn at most.

Wonder pea likes to sing the SpongeBob song "this is the best day ever". On Sunday we were all singing "this is the worst day ever" because nothing would appease the Pumpkin King. It was like someone had snuck into the house the night before and replaced our happy child with the spawn of satan.

"Are you hungry? Need a diaper change? This toy? This one? A blanket? A pillow? Your tired? Your cold? Your hot? You want $10? Here take $10...just stop, for the love of god stop!!"

By some miracle he actually went to sleep that night. At which point the three of us collapsed right where we were.

The next morning I approached his bassinet with cross and holy water in hand. As I peaked in I could see he was awake and happy, smiling for no reason and laughing at the air. I was thrilled that the evil had left him. I picked him up and said "hey buddy how we doing today?" He looked at me, smiled and then spit up all over me.

At least he was happy...

Turtle Power

Today we wrapped animation on ReelFx's portion of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. It was great to be part of another feature project and a lot of fun to work on a property that I enjoyed so much as a kid.

Imagi Animation Studios in Hong Kong is handling the majority of the animation for the film. I can tell you there are some pretty insane action scenes with the turtles that give me a headache. Not from watching, but from thinking about how they planned and blocked it all out. Yowza.

The film opens March 30, 2007 and should be a fun time at the movies.

The Ant Bully on DVD

The Ant Bully is now on DVD. Apparently a few people missed it while it was in theaters so hopefully those folks will give it a look on video.

Now I will admit that the cover art is rather awful. Lucas looks stupidly happy and all the other characters are in no way proportionate to one another. Don't let that dissuade you from picking it up. Most folks who saw the film in theaters (all 10 of them) seemed to enjoy it and perhaps you will too.

I did a bit of animation on the Behind the Scenes section, which I have put up in my Animation area for your viewing enjoyment.

Werewolves

Here is my submission for this weeks DrawerGeeks because werewolves have kids too.

Bleeding Pixels

I recently answered 10 Quick questions over at Dave Johnson's bleedingpixels.blogspot.com. Other buddies o mine have done the 10 Quick, like Andrew Burke and Mike Walling. Why not stop by and have a read? When your done, take a look around the rest of the blog for some good information and links.

Dave is one of my students this quarter at Animation Mentor. Check him out at 3dave.com.

The Very First Noel

The Very First Noel is now on sale at a retailer near you. Yes it is true! It is great entertainment for the whole family so why not run out and buy a copy. Or buy 10 copies and get that Christmas shopping done early.

In celebration of the release, I have uploaded some of my shots to the Animation area.

The offical web site has gotten a pretty nifty upgrade as well.

Pirate Cove

With the help of fellow ReelFxer Jason Owen, I finally hauled all my pirate stuff up to the studio. I never realized how much I had until I had to break it down when I left DNA. My wife was thrilled when all this stuff left our house.











My area at ReelFx is a good bit larger than what I had over at DNA. There is actually room between the animators which is nice in case I want to stretch out and take a nap on the floor, which I frequently do.....


One of the guys has a Master Replicas Kermit the Frog....




I felt much safer knowing that Kermit was standing guard.

Halloween

So last week was Halloween and if you were like me you ate so much candy that you went into a chocolate coma. I love Halloween. You get to dress up and be someone else for a day AND you get to gorge yourself on candy. What could be better?

How about a Halloween party. Every year my good friend and ex-DNAer, Deanna Molinaro and her husband Aaron invite all of us misfits to her house for beer and cake. This year was freezing, freaking cold so most everyone stayed inside the house.

Now you combine beer and a lot of people in close quarters and things are bound to get crazy. Take what happened with me and my buddy Ernesto Bottger.

Ernesto came as a popular character from a Spanish kids shows, super hero El Chapulin Colorado. Seeing as how I don't speak the Spanish and had a little too much Mr Beer, I basically called him Captain Hot all night.
At one point Ernesto flipped out and let me have it.

And a scuffle broke out.

But since the alcohol was making us tired we decided to call it a draw. Because that is what Halloween is all about: costumes, candy, fighting and friendship. Deanna as Mother Nature, Ernesto as Captain Hot and me as a pirate....of course.

Texas State Fun

A couple weekends ago we went to the annual Texas State Fair. I like going to the fair, it is a fun way to spend the day and to drop a lot of money. My god is it expensive to go the ol fair. When the day started, we were doing pretty well. As we were about to buy our tickets a nice woman turned to me and said here ya go and walked off. She handed me a complimentary ticket. Awesome. That plus a coupon that got Wonder-pea in for free, and we were doing pretty well.

But once you get inside its all over. Since they make you purchase tickets you really have no idea how much anything really costs. Wonder-pea wanted to go on a train ride which was 6 tickets. I wanted to ride with her, because I just love riding the kiddie train, which cost me 6 tickets. I figured out later that the experience really cost us about $6. Needless to say we avoided more rides. But then....there is the food.

Funnel cakes, corn dogs and anything you could ever want deep fried is all there waiting for you. In addition to fried ice cream, oreos, cheesecake and several others, this year they had fried Coke. Someone who had deep fried everything imaginable must have figure that the only challenge left was to fry a liquid.

While cruising the fair and trying to figure out how the hell you actually deep fry Coke, we passed a stand selling "fried donkey tails" which immediately made a picture in my head of tailess donkeys standing in a pen with white X's on their bums. The initial reaction was: bleah.

Later we found a food booklet that told us what a fried donkey tail was: a footlong hot dog split down the side, filled with cheese and deep fried in a tortia. My god that sounds....delicious. We sought out said fried donkey tails, devoured them and headed towards the fried cheesecake which I adore.

But something happened on the walk to the cheesecake. Maybe what I had just eaten had just registered with my brain or the smell of fried everything in the air was just too much for my stomach, but hearing the words "fried" and "cheesecake" just about sent me into cardiac arrest.

Instead we went over to the car show where Wonder-pea had a blast trying out all the latest models and as a bonus, it required no tickets. I just wish she would open her eyes when driving.

New Addition

Next Thursday we had a C-section scheduled, but apparently my son did not want to miss Halloween and decided to come.....today!!

Lil Pumpkin didn't make a lot of fuss when brought from his warm, liquidy home, into the big bright, cold world. He was kinda like "WAAAAaaaa..... ooo this blanket is nice.. oh I get a hat too?....sweet...I'm digging this".

Both Mom and baby are doing great and Wonder-pea is super excited that her brother is finally here.

Drawer Geeks

This week is my first submission.....well..2nd...sorta to Drawer Geeks! Every two weeks at DrawerGeeks.com several talented folks post drawings based on topics ranging from "Childhood Nightmares" to "Godzilla". I used to almost, be sort of, not too bad with the whole drawing thing but to be honest I haven't really drawn in a long time.

So here is my first submission for "Movie Monsters", which as it turns out was for this weeks topic last year. Big thanks to Tony Bonilla for giving me wrong information. I will get you Tony...oh yes..



And then there is my real first submission for the topic "Grim Reaper". Not as super ninja awesome as a lot of the other fine art work on the site, but it's a lot less painful than a hot poker in the eye.