Dreamscape

With Facebook's Timeline being implemented to everyone's profiles, I wanted to do something other than just a photo for my Cover. In middle school creative writing classes, we were taught an exercise called "stream of consciousness." I remember literally just writing whatever came to thought and just not thinking too much about it. Sometimes when you apply creative exercises used for other outlets into art, it becomes pretty interesting. I started sketching through stream of consciousness for this piece. It turned out pretty fun and weird. I added a photo of my face dreaming the design and it all came together.

-G

Assemble

Looking forward to The Avengers coming very soon...

-G

The Corner

All things have their time and place.

-G

Inner Imagination

After church on Sundays, my parents would go shopping at the local Asian markets for groceries when I was a kid. I loved it when they took us to the Japanese stores because they had Japanese bookstores there that I could browse as I waited. Once when I was ten, while waiting for my mom to shop, my dad found me reading an Anpanman comic/storybook. Seeing how much I liked it, he bought it for me.

I poured over that simple children's book over and over, mostly because I think I just loved the world that Takashi Yanase created. The simple story lines and colorful drawings still pull me in today. A majority of my Orchard Heroes inspiration comes from these stories of Anpanman and his friends. This was the stuff that made me smile as a boy.

This book was volume 1 out of 3. I remember returning to the store a few weeks later and discovering that they had sold out. I've regretted not buying the other two books for years. Ever since I was old enough to realize that there were two more volumes out there, I would spend time browsing every asian bookstore that I've ever been in, looking for volumes 2 and 3 of the series. With the internet, Amazon and Ebay, you would think locating these books wouldn't be that difficult, but THEY ARE! The books went out of print back in 1990 and are extremely rare. For almost 20 years, I've searched online and browsed through bookstores from Los Angeles to Taipei looking for these books that perhaps ignited something artistically pure and innocent inside me.

I had almost given up the search in recent years, but last week out of pure random chance, I came across a website that had a description of a book that might have been what I had been searching for. A used bookstore in New York listed the book, and 19 years, 2000 miles and 10 dollars later, I was able to relive that childhood inspiration.

I had finally found Anpanman Vol. 2

I have the rest of my life to find Volume 3, and I hope I still do. Its hard to explain why a grown man would spend so much hope into finding a children's book, but there's something that is captured in the imagination of your inner child that you'll always cherish and never forget. As an adult, if I can get even a tiny glimpse of that moment again, I could spend the next 30 years in that pursuit and still feel satisfied.

Here's to making that inner child in us smile from time to time.

-G

Fairy Tales in Taipei

I've been on vacation in Asia for the last week or so. I had the chance to visit the ever bustling Hong Kong and now I'm in Taipei, Taiwan. On the plan ride over to Taipei, I read an ad in the in-flight magazine on an exhibit at a nearby museum on the Art of Disney. The first free moment I got, I went out there and checked it out.

At the National Museum of History in Taipei, from now until mid March, you can go see some of the behind the scenes, sketches, designs, notes, and all other kinds of fun little bits of information on some of Disney's most famous fairy tales. Ranging from Snow White all the way to Tangled, you can get a really unique perspective of these films. I'm a sucker for sketches and notes on designs of animations and films so I had a really good time. No pictures inside the exhibit though...:(

-G

Bad Boys, Bad Boys

Whatcha gonna do when they come for you?

-G

Two Faced

Cool Alter-Ego designs by Danny Haas. Check out his gallery here.

-G

Just Around The Corner

Christmas Trees are everywhere! To each their own :)

-G

The Art of Waiting...

Warm up doodle.

-G

A Villains Gallery

If you've spent any amount of time in the geek world, then you'll unavoidably become familiar with some of cartoon's and comic's most famous Good vs Evil relationships. Many of us know the villains just as well as our heroes. Spider-Man had his Green Goblin, Batman his Joker, the Ninja Turtles their Shredder and The X-Men their Magneto. Despite the main villain holding their own in terms of characterization, a lot of times, what most people will agree on is that the reason many of these heroes have become so popular is due to their gallery of villains. Not only was there the Joker for Batman, but he also had an extremely large gallery of foes. As interesting as your heros are, a large cast of interesting, unique and different villains will bring so much more out of the hero than by themselves. Each villain should provide a new facet of challenge that will continue to round out the hero.

With that in mind, I've spent the last few months brainstorming and doodling ideas and potential characters just so I have a large gallery to choose from. Even if some of these are never used, its still really fun to just make up the character and backgrounds of potential bad guys. Above is a design for a band of villains that may find themselves showing up soon.

Its the "bad" in our lives that sometimes enhances and reveals, often times beautifully, the "good" that we have.

-G