CHADES CHALLENGE XXII: SMOKING AVENGERS
As you can see, I'm still on a Batman kick. But what sort of characters are you supposed to draw with a challenge like "smoking avengers"? Feel free to contribute your own designs! Just post your tobacco-toking titans any time before next Friday (Christmas Day!) and I'll post a link to your designage. Sketch greatly!

I went on a Batman tangent this morning. Always fun!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Xorg here is thankful for his cat, Zed. Unfortunately for Zed, Xorg hails from the same planet as Alf and, well...let's just say they won't be serving turkey for Thanksgiving at Xorg's house.

Staff Meeting
I just completed a quarter staff class at Pixar.

Now I can finally track down and duel Star Wars kid.

Hog Warts

I recently discovered a breed of prehistoric pig-wolves called entelodonts. Well, I didn't discover them, I learned about their existence. Below is the aptly named Daeodon, or "terrible hog". Why they chose to use a frightened bikini girl for size reference, I have no idea. Maybe daeodons were also chauvinist pigs.

Below is Andrewsarchus, my new favorite non-dinosaur animal.

These guys reminded me of the wargs from Lord of the Rings, so I thought it'd be fun to sketch my version of a warg-rider. He had to be someone real nasty who looked like he'd be right at home riding a Daeodon into battle or wrestling an Andrewsarchus into submission. Here's what I came up with.

If this guy existed during primeval times, he'd certainly give cro-magnon man a run for his money. For the colors, I googled "mottled" and found this cool texture. It has all the earthy greens and browns you'd associate with an orc. Thanks to Photoshop's eyedropping color-sampler, I was able to use this as a direct palette, and it worked pretty well!

Dailies

We're in "the white-hot center of crunch time" as our director, Lee, puts it. That means loooong dailies. Which, in turn, means lots of time for sketching! Here are my two favorite subjects: dinos and orcs!

GIVING THANKS

I'm a huge fan of Halloween and Christmas, so after October 31st I'm always tempted to skip Thanksgiving and bust out the holly and Christmas albums. This year, however, I'm taking the time to give the often-overlooked turkey day its due and really reflect on all the things I should be thankful for.

These are just the top five.

1. The lessons of Jesus Christ, Bill Nye the Science Guy, and Yoda
2. Flavored coffee creamers
3. Control-Z
4. Audio Commentaries
5. Somewhere, somehow John Williams is still making music

And thank you for stopping by!

Aloha! Sorry for the grievous lack of posting, I just got back from vacation in Hawaii. I went with family, including my Grandpa Bill, who used to surf with the legendary Duke Kahanamoku.

I was inspired by my grandpa's stories of hot-dogging and hangin' ten with the Duke, and couldn't help but fire-up my imagination while surrounded by the tropical hillsides and rainforests of Jurassic Park. I'm definitely ready to plunge back into work, reinvigorated with my cup filled to the brim with creative juices.

There's a lot to be said about hard work, and that's certainly the only way to get better at animating. But as I heard Brad Bird himself once say, "You've got to have a life to create the illusion of life."

I've got some serious post-creating to do, but while you wait for the next Chades Challenge (I'm, what? Two behind?), here's some creative nourishment for you to chew on!

Symphony of Science

WANTED

Sorry for slacking on the Choose Your Own Drawing Adventure challenge last Friday, I'll post at the end of this week. Last week was dedicated to preparing for a weekend filmshoot. I work with my church's film/video ministry, and we just wrapped principle photography on our second project, Wanted. Here are some stills from the shoot. Unfortunately, we neglected to inform the local law enforcement that we had a fake weapon on set, so the fuzz showed up just to make sure we weren't actually causing havok.

You see, I was co-directing the day's shoot, and I find that packing iron helps to keep the actors "motivated"...


My co-director (and founder of our video ministry), Kerwin Kuniyoshi takes a much more laid-back approach to film-making.

Nathan Cooper played our irascible villain, Snake.


Theresa Donahoe as our snarky "good" samaritan, April.


And here I am with our star, Ellie Wheeler, who is portraying Sarah Rive, our version of the prodigal son. Here we are endorsing dental hygiene.

A Griffin Story

My friend Josh has been working on little stories with his three-year old son, Griffin. Griffin writes the story and his dad illustrates. Josh posted one of their stories on his blog and welcomed anyone to illustrate a Griffin tale, so I thought I'd take a shot at it. I had one condition: the story had to be about dinosaurs. Fortunately, Griffin was willing to oblige and here's what he came up with!

"Griffin's Dinosaur Story"

"The Apatosaurus is named Potoesaurus and the Triceratops is named Bobby."

"Potoesaurus drinks a full bag of dinosaur orange juice, like a big, big, grasshopper and a big, big, cockroach."

"Bobby bonks stuff."

"Potoesaurus is in my room playing trains."

"Bobby is bonking a watermelon."

"THE END"