Leonardo would make a cool looking half-robot, don't you think? If I'm being honest I was kind of thinking about the brief period in Star Trek: Next Generation where Picard is assimilated into the Borg. I mean, Leo is the leader of the Turtles, so he's kinda like their captain.
I love games, but I'm not always up to date on the latest ones because I don't really have the time or the money to spend on them like I wish I could. Recently Shaun bought Modern Warfare 3 and he's been playing that pretty steadily, so after I finished Dragon Age II (for the second time) I borrowed Modern Warfare 2. As ridiculous as it may sound I was interested in the story so I could play the campaign of the new one. I really enjoy FPS games, but I get bored of them pretty quickly. I'm definitely a single-player story-driven kind of guy. I was going to play online a bit until Christmas comes and I (hopefully) get some new games (Uncharted 3 I'm looking at you), but I decided to go backwards and start playing the God of War games again.
Basically, when God of War 3 came out I rushed through the re-release of the first two just to refresh myself on the main plot points and I left a bunch of fairly simple trophies unfinished. I decided I should go back and finish collecting those to kill some time before Christmas, but when I put the disc in I remembered that my PS3 crashed since I played it last and I have no God of War save files on my new Playstation. Now I'm going back through it like it's the first time and actually really enjoying it. This is probably the 4th or 5th time I've actually played the story mode since it first debuted on PS2 and it still holds up pretty well.
Anyway, I drew Raph as the main character from the games, Kratos. I think the parallels are pretty straightforward: red color theme, rage, similar weapons etc...
We were driving to my grandparents house for Thanksgiving with my Dad's side of the family today when all of a sudden my ears started to feel really hot and itchy. My wife looked at me and said my face was getting really red and splotchy and she asked if I felt OK. Aside from feeling hot and itchy I felt alright, but I knew I was having an allergic reaction to something.
Austin is known for giving people allergies. I'm lucky, I don't suffer from almost any seasonal allergies, but maybe three times since I've moved here I've broken out in hives or red splotches for no reason. After we stopped at the store and I took some Benadryl I was fine within an hour, but we couldn't ever figure out what caused it in the first place. I didn't eat or do anything out of the ordinary. It wasn't life threatening by any means, but it was weird and uncomfortable at worst.
Yesterday's post was all about turkey pot pie, but we have another tradition for the Friday after Thanksgiving: decorating for Christmas. Usually this involves putting up the tree and hanging various Christmas-y things around the apartment. Our tree is the same fake tree we bought for our first Christmas as a married couple 5 Christmases ago. It's looking a little worse for the wear since it doubles as an irresistible cat perch. Keeping the cat out of the tree is another age-old holiday tradition of ours.
We put the tree up last night and while we hung ornaments and cooked the pot pie we watched our first Christmas movie of the season, Elf. We used to hang generic red and silver glass ball ornaments and stars, but we've got enough individual personal ornaments to fill our tree now. I don't mind trees that are very organized and designed to look a certain way with matching ornaments, but to me that's missing the point of the Christmas tree. I love going through our boxes of ornaments and remembering where they came from and when we got them. To me a Christmas tree should be a history of a family and a reflection of your personality.
Every year on Christmas Eve my wife and I exchange ornaments. Usually we get each other one of the Hallmark ornaments from that year's collection, but not always. I can't even count the number of Cinderella and Spider-Man ornaments we have on our tree because of this tradition. Ninja Turtle ornaments haven't been as popular in recent years, but I have a few of those as well. The ball ornament is one I've had since I was a little kid. I literally cannot remember a Christmas where it wasn't hanging on the tree. It's probably one of my favorites to hang and every year it gets a place of honor near the top.
It's the day after Thanksgiving, which is actually my favorite part of Thanksgiving. For one thing people stop giving up on their bullshit pretense to not notice that Christmas is right around the corner--my wife had three Christmas Spotify playlists and would listen to parts of songs, but not whole songs because it wasn't Christmas time yet--but more importantly the day after Thanksgiving means turkey pot pie!
The turkey pot pie after Thanksgiving is one of the few, and possibly only, food related traditions that I get excited about. Thanksgiving itself is just so-so. My wife makes some really great breakfast things for our movie trilogy tradition each year, but as far as traditional Thanksgiving food goes I don't really care. Turkey (except as a lunch meat or smoked drumstick) is usually dry and kind of flavorless and I've never put much stock in most of the side dishes. I enjoy the time off and hanging out with friends and family, but the eating part never did much for me. But every year on the Friday after Thanksgiving my wife buys premade pie crusts and fills them with leftover turkey, stuffing, carrots and gravy and makes the best pot pie ever. She says it's because all of the ingredients that go into the pie took so long to make as separate delicious dishes, but I don't care why it tastes so good. It just does.
It's Thanksgiving! Every year we pick a trilogy to watch with our friends. This year we're watching the original three Indiana Jones films. Enjoy stuffing all your stupid faces, everybody!
That's it. I'm done trying to come close to evening out the scales for the number of times I feature each Turtle in their own picture. Everyone that visits is going to have to come to grips with the fact that Donatello is going to get the lion's share of the posts. He is my avatar in the Ninja Turtle world and anything I post in regards to something I did in real life is probably going to feature him. So just deal with it, Donatello haters.
Moving on, I am not actually a master plumber, despite the title of this post (I just typed "turtle" instead of "title." This blog is affecting my muscle memory in strange ways). However, I did fix my mom's toilet after work last night. I replaced a leaky water supply valve and hose and adjusted the float so it wouldn't keep running constantly. If you've ever done much toilet repair you'll recognize that these are not especially difficult things to fix, but if you haven't I sound like a real bad ass, like I should go work for Roto Rooter and then I can get my own show about paranormal investigations! This idea is sounding better and better.
OK, so maybe I'm not the best handy-man-fix-it-guy, but I think I do fine with small projects around the house. Way better than I ever imagined I would when I was younger and had no interest in these kinds of things. I can hang things (shelves/pictures/bigger pictures), fix brakes (to a limited degree) and build the best IKEA furniture you've ever seen. I hear so many people bitch about IKEA and their instructions with no words; that's the whole point! It's so simple. They give you pictures. If yours doesn't look exactly like the one in the picture then you're doing it wrong. Maybe I have more patience than most people with it, who knows, but I actually enjoy building IKEA furniture. It's like doing a puzzle. A puzzle that you can put shit on when you're done. A puzzle that makes your house look like grown-ups live there because it's got furniture now. A puzzle that can really bring a room together. Like a really nice underwater marine-life puzzle with a school of dolphins in the center.
I told my wife the other night that my priorities have changed since I was younger. If you had told me when I was 15 that when I grew up I would be dreaming of a nice house with a big garage, a full tool box and home improvement projects I would have laughed and told you to get out of the way, you're blocking Tony Hawk's Pro Skater. I guess things change and it helps that I'm a bit frugal when it comes to fixing things. We're in an apartment now so it's not much of an issue, but if something breaks and I have to pay to have it fixed you can damn well bet I'll be on the internet trying to teach myself before I call in a professional. Thankfully my wife comes from a largely do-it-yourself family and usually indulges me. You can't learn if you don't try, right?
Alright, I'm done bragging about my extremely basic home repair skills. I'm gonna go build an IKEA bookshelf to take the edge off.
So Thursday is Thanksgiving, started by these guys according to all your Elementary text books and debunked by all your cool friends who know everything. But still. Look at the awesome hats they wore.
Tonight was a sad night. It was the last ever TV Dinner at the Highball.What is TV Dinner you ask? Well, let me explain.
A while ago, I don't know how long but it doesn't matter, our friend John Smith told us in addition to hosting Geeks Who Drink at the Highball he was going to start hosting a thing called TV Dinner on Monday nights with his Geeks Who Drink co-host James Pound. The idea was for people to come to the Highball and hang out for a couple of hours while watching some of our favorite TV shows from when we were younger. They started with three weeks of Saved by the Bell and over time did a bunch of other shows including The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, a line-up of classic Snick shows, Arrested Development and finished up with the best of Judd Apatow which was mostly Freaks and Geeks and a few episodes of The Critic. We attended pretty regularly at first and took part in a lot of the between-episode-games like designing an album cover for a Zack Attack Greatest Hits or the classic Bluth Family Chicken Dance-Off. Shaun usually attended with us and was always active in tweeting along with the episodes.
Over time we stopped going as frequently. It seemed we were always busy on Monday nights or we didn't have the money to spend on it. TV Dinner itself was free, but we would inevitably spend money on drinks and often eat there just because of the timing. I guess attendance was never quite what the Highball was hoping for and they decided to stop doing it. Last night was the last one.
We hadn't talked about going, but when we heard it was ending Shaun, my wife and I knew we had to be there. By this point James had been hosting it by himself for a while and we wanted to help give him a good last night to go out on. Plus he was showing Freaks and Geeks and The Critic, so what's not to love?
We showed up and enjoyed some snacks and drinks. We laughed at inappropriate tweets from other audience members, we made paper airplanes and left a mess of them all over the stage. Even our friend Mandy joined us one last time. The last episode of the last night of TV Dinner was the finale of Freaks and Geeks. If you've never seen the show I highly recommend it. It only ran one short season and the ending was so bittersweet it kills me that there weren't more episodes. To me it feels very similar to the final episode of Home Movies. It was the perfect episode to end TV Dinner with and everyone had a really good time.
So thanks John and James for hosting a really great show even if the number didn't always reflect it and even if we didn't always come. And thanks James for bringing it to a close in a most appropriate manner. I guess this means we'll have to make it out to Geeks Who Drink more than once a year now.
What can I possibly say about Aliens on Ice that would do it justice? Probably nothing, but I'll do my best anyway.
A little while ago I posted a blog about watching Alien and Aliens for the first time. The reason I was watching it, besides wanting to see two awesome movies I somehow missed growing up, was because my friend, Shaun, was about to take part in what was sure to be the most ridiculous stage show any of us had ever seen: Aliens on Ice.
A local theater group called Old Murder House Theater has become known for their over-the-top hilarious stage adaptations of popular movies. Combining a large amount of talent, ingenuity, nostalgia, amazing impersonations and cardboard sets they have performed stage versions of such films as Die Hard, Back to the Future, and Robocop. The day that they posted on their Facebook page that their next production would be James Cameron's Aliens performed on ice I immediately received a text from Shaun about how amazing it was going to be. Then, realizing that this was too good an opportunity to pass up, he e-mailed the director, Sam Eidson, and offered his services for the show. Not only did he watch Aliens repeatedly as a kid and can still quote the dialogue, he's also been playing ice hockey for over ten years and is completely comfortable on skates. The only thing that I can think of that might have been a better fit for Shaun is if they had done Top Gun on ice.
Eventually after a few exchanges they brought Shaun in to play one of the Xenomorphs (the aliens) along with another hockey player, a figure skater and Sam's brother. The idea was that the marines would be bumbling and unsteady on the ice and the aliens would be experienced skaters with a definite advantage, much like the movie. We were privy to a little insight into the rehearsal process through Shaun and after his first meeting with the group on the ice he was less than confident in the cast's skating ability. This was only two weeks out from the show. Luckily part of the charm of Old Murder House Theater's shows is their somewhat frantic and unsteady nature. Mistakes only seem to make them better. Shaun said that Sam put it best when explaining that, "Perfection is not expected."
Over the next week Shaun's worries took a back seat to his excitement, but he discussed it with us very little. We asked him to keep the details to a minimum so we would be surprised come show time. He said it was really coming together, but they hadn't quite had a full rehearsal yet. When we talked to him before the first performance he said it would be the first time they would have run the entire show in costume on ice.
We couldn't wait.
I would love to recount the entire show beat for beat, but I won't. I'll just highlight some of my favorite moments.
The set was made of two double-sided walls framing an air-lock door. The walls started off reflecting the ship/colony interior and then rotated to resemble the inside of the alien lair. It was set up right at center ice facing the stands with a few spotlights and speakers on stands. All of the actors had their own wireless headset mics which was a welcome and necessary improvement over previous shows where they were forced to pass around a couple of hand held mics. The main cast (all male by the way) played no fewer than two parts each which led to several hilarious moments where an actor would have to have a conversation with himself. It was awkward and hilarious. The sets and costumes were amazing and ingenious. Most of it looked to be cardboard, but there were a few pieces that really stood out to me like Vasquez's "steady-cam" mounted gun and the loader from the final fight with the queen alien. They were impressive to the point of distraction because I was trying to figure out how they were made instead of watching the show.
The actors were better on the ice than I thought they would be, though some definitely looked more comfortable than others. The guy playing Ripley (Kirk Johnson) was probably the best skater of the bunch, but once the aliens showed up even he looked like he barely knew what he was doing. The alien attacks were fast and a lot of fun leaving behind lots of acid alien blood (silly string). One of the highlights was a part that no one expected, mostly because it's probably the most ridiculous thing you could incorporate into a retelling of the movie Aliens: a Disney song and dance number.
There's a scene in the movie where the marines and Ripley are trapped in a room watching their hand held radar unit as the aliens get closer and closer. Eventually they know the aliens are in the room, but they can't see them. That's when the aliens attack from their positions in the crawl spaces of the room. In the Old Murder House Theater Version the aliens spring from their hiding places and instead do a rousing rendition of "Be Our Guest" from Beauty and the Beast complete with choreographed ice dancing. It was so far out of left field that I think everyone was confused for a moment before the laughs and cheers started. The marines stand frozen as the aliens (led by Sam in an alien mask) skate and sing around them until eventually they join in as well (led by Kirk doing a spot on Angela Lansbury impersonation). When the song ended it was business as usual with more alien attacks and gun fire, but everyone was still laughing trying to wrap our heads around what we just saw.
The script was excellent to be sure, but some of my favorite moments weren't scripted. Just after the marines have "secured" the station and they pick up movement on their radar Sam leaves the stage for a quick change into his Newt costume while they continue to skate in circles looking for what they think is an alien. Both nights there was some difficulty in getting Sam into his costume which left the rest of the cast skating in circles for several minutes improvising things like, "This place is fucking huge!" and, "Hmm... that alien must be busy with something."
I told Shaun later that I think part of what makes these shows so fun is the hint of danger. That was definitely present in this show featuring a bunch of actors bumbling around essentially wearing razors on their feet and moving among set pieces and extension cords while stage hands threw fire crackers at them. The audience felt the danger on the first night when, in order to set the proper mood for the escape from the base, they lit a firework fountain that launched roman candles into the air to ricochet off the ceiling. We all held our breath waiting for one of the flaming shots to catch a bad bounce and end up in the audience or in Newt's blonde wig (one came pretty damn close). The second night's show was only allowed to go on when they promised no fireworks would hit the ceiling.
To put it simply the show exceeded even our wildest imaginations of what it might contain and after the first night we couldn't wait for the second showing. My wife had the brilliant idea to go out and buy some cheap fake flowers and small stuffed animals. She wanted to throw them on the ice at the end of the last performance like they do for figure skaters. We bought a few small bunches, a Santa plush and a snowman plush. When the cast came out for their final curtain call we attempted to rain the flowers down on them, but they didn't go as far as we had hoped. Luckily Sam saw them and he picked one up thanking the audience for coming out. It was a rare treat and I only wish it had run longer, but that's part of what makes these shows so special. We will most definitely never see anything like it again.
We're going to the second showing of Aliens on Ice tonight and this is what I'll probably look like. Last night was fucking freezing in there. I've been in my fair share of ice rinks and this one was colder than any of the others I remember. Oh well, it's a small price to pay for this show. Check back tomorrow for my review/picture.
Skydiving is something I used to really want to do, but as I've gotten a little bit older my desire has waned a little. I would still do it, but it's not something I would probably seek out. I think if I ever go it'll have to be for someone else's special occasion.
I was just trying to come up with something to draw and I thought about doing a skydiving picture and right at that moment I overheard someone talking about skydiving and I knew it was meant to be. So, Leonardo skydiving, pre-open parachute.
Today I was feeling pretty tired and kind of stressed about my car not being fixed yet so while we were out my wife suggested we just do Subway Wednesday for dinner and watch X-Files. Maybe I should explain.
Subway Wednesday, apparently, is something her family in Phoenix has been doing where they eat Subway for dinner... on Wednesday. It's really not too complicated. And since it's Wednesday we did our own Subway Wednesday. That's all.
You know that old saying, "I don't know anything about art, but I know what I like?" That's me when it comes to still, visual arts. I can dissect song lyrics and music for meaning, or debate the worth of a film if you asked me to, I'll even write you a dissertation on why (some) video games should be considered art, but when it comes to paintings, sculptures or architecture I have little or no critical insight. This would ordinarily leave me with bare walls in my apartment, but not anymore. We're actually having a hard time finding wall space for all the framed pieces we've collected, and most of it is screen printed art and movie posters.
Mondo is probably the biggest name in the screen printed movie poster market today and we happen to live in the same town as their physical store. I remember when they were just a little t-shirt shop attached to the original Alamo Drafthouse. Somewhere along the way they got into the custom screen printed movie poster game and now they're the top dogs. Their posters sell out in minutes only to show up on ebay at ten times the price and now the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is collecting and archiving all of their releases.
Mondo mostly does less well known movies or films with cult classic status which I love. Buying from them lets me hang movie posters in my house like I used to do in my room when I was in high school and college, except now they're respectable pieces of art. So far we only have a few Mondo pieces including Giant from this summer's rolling road show and Tyler Stout's Kill Bill which we only got through a stroke of luck after it sold out in like three minutes online. We happened to be seeing a movie at the South Lamar location and struck up a conversation with the guy working the Mondo shop. He mentioned he had some that were returned for damage in the back. Turns out the damage was a teeny tiny tear on the edge of the poster. In the frame you can't even see it and it looks amazing on our wall. I wish I could hang most of what Mondo releases, but the one I really wish I had bought but couldn't afford at the time was this beautifully done Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles poster.
Another smaller collection we've unintentionally started is by a local artist, Tim Doyle. Almost exactly a year ago a friend gave me an mc chris poster for a Secret Santa gift exchange. I loved it, but I only just finally framed and hung it a couple of weeks ago. Last week while walking around downtown we started looking around a new poster shop attached to a clothing store we love to browse called Parts and Labour. Inside the poster shop we found some really great screen print posters based several Wes Anderson, Quentin Tarantino and Cohen Brother's films. Then we found a really amazing Breaking Bad print that we had seen hanging in a tattoo parlor almost a year ago, but never knew who did it. Last but not least we saw my mc chris poster that I had recently hung in our apartment. They were all by the same guy: Tim Doyle. You may remember me mentioning that we met and talked with him at the Austin Comic Con. He's a very cool guy and as it turns out we have very similar tastes in a lot of things. We ended up only buying his Life Aquatic print (the one that Donatello's hanging in my picture for the day), but if we get nothing else I really want to go back and get the Royal Tenenbaum's print and the Breaking Bad print.
Ironically we still haven't hung the Life Aquatic print because we've had a hard time finding 12x24 inch frames, but he gave me a suggestion for a place when I talked to him. I just need to get my car back so I can go check it out.
Among these Mondo and Tim Doyle prints we've got a scattering of other awesome pieces like the minimalist Ghostbusters poster my wife bought me last year, and the pretty stellar photos she's taken of some of our favorite musicians hanging in our music/toy/nerd room. Maybe if I get a chance I'll take some pics and post them to the blog so you can see what you're missing by not living in my apartment.
Alright. I'll stop talking about screen prints and movie posters now. They're just awesome. That's all.
This was me today on my drive home. I was all good, jammin' out to some Psychopathic Rydas and on my way to pick up some veggies for dinner when all of a sudden I smelled something funny. I looked down and the needle on my temperature gauge was buried in the red. Luckily I don't usually panic in these situations since I'm kind of used to it by now. I pulled over and turned the car off. When I popped the hood the radiator was shooting steam through a crack in the top. It sucks, but hopefully it's just the radiator and not something worse that caused the radiator to crack.
Update: The service center called. It was just the radiator. It cost me $600, but at least that's all it was. I debated on replacing it myself, but with what it would have cost me in parts, towing and time I decided to just have them do it. Man I hate dealing with car problems.
This isn't a post about the real comic con. I mean, the really big comic con, the one in San Diego. But it is a post about my first comic con experience which happened today. In Austin. For like almost 2 hours.
So a few weeks ago there was a Groupon for a $10 pass for the last day of the Austin Comic Con. We snatched it up because we always want to go to these conventions, but it never seems to work out. We figured $10 a ticket isn't too bad even if we don't end up going.
Well, we did go, we were just a little late. My wife did the Race for the Cure 5k this morning and then we went and had breakfast before we had to drop her aunt off at the airport. Once we got home and got ready and then got back downtown it was after 3:00 and the con was only open until 5:00. That's OK, we already had tickets and they were only $10, plus we were in costume so we couldn't just go home.
Oh yeah, we wore costumes. Did I forget that part?
My wife wore her April O'Niel costume which she worries over and complains endlessly about every time she wears it and then ends up getting like a million compliments and picture requests. She was definitely the favorite out of the two of us. If you're attractive, you have boobs and you're in costume you will get stopped every two feet for a picture at a comic con. I know that now.
I, on the other hand, was wearing a new costume I put together and was slightly less recognizable: Dr. McNinja! I've been wanting to put this costume together for a while, I just haven't had the time or reason to. I was quite pleased with myself even though most people didn't know who I was. The nice thing about being Dr. McNinja is that it works on two levels. On one level you get the people who recognize the character; on the other level you get the people who see you and say, "Oh, cool, a ninja/doctor." Close, but not quite.
Since it was the end of the last day of the con we didn't have much time to look around, but we did see some cool art and talked to some interesting people. We spent some time chatting with a local artist, Tim Doyle, who did a poster that we just happened to buy last week. We actually have two pieces of his in our house, but more on that in a later post.
We didn't end up buying much of anything seeing as how we don't have much to spend to begin with, but it was a lot of fun. I'd say that $10 was worth the hour and a half we spent at the comic con. Maybe next year we'll get to experience more of it.
I drew the Turtles walking a stereotypical convention floor. Donatello's checking out a comic booth where the artist and writer are waiting to sign something. Raphael is looking at the weapons. Michelangelo is checking out the costume booth and trying on an oversize head piece modeled after his own head (very meta of you, Mikey). Leonardo is just walking and taking it all in. There's a lot to see at comic cons after all.
Inspiration for this one comes from a couple of different places. First, Skyrim came out yesterday. I haven't played it and I don't plan on playing it for a while, but I really want to. The big thing about that game, besides the scope, is the whole "infinite dragon" gimmick. Honestly, I don't care so much about fighting dragons forever as long as the story is good.
On top of that I'm still playing Dragon Age 2. I beat it once (came in right around 52 hours) and I loved it. I started a second playthrough as a warrior who's a little bit more to the point. Partly I'm doing a PS3 trophy clean-up run, but I'm also doing it for a different side of the story. I'm about two thirds of the way through right now I believe. It shouldn't take me nearly as long to finish my second playthrough, though. I've already read all the codex entries.
The last reason I drew this is just because dragons are awesome and who wouldn't want to ride one? This one is kind of stupid looking because I'm a terrible artist, but even so I'd ride that thing. Did you see How to Train Your Dragon? It was great and I think every little kid wishes they could tame a dragon to ride into battle on the playground. For some of us those dreams don't die with age.
One of my favorite authors is Chuck Palahniuk. I like him so much my wife and I have an almost complete collection of first editions of his work (only missing two) and I can spell his last name without looking it up.
You might be most familiar with him as the author of Fight Club which was turned into an awesome movie by David Fincher starring Ed Norton and Brad Pitt. Fight Club was his first published novel and the first one I read, but my favorite is probably still his second book, Survivor. Just take my word for it, it's good.
A couple of weeks ago he released his twelfth novel, Damned. It's definitely different than his other books, but I liked it a lot. I won't go too much into specifics, but the plot revolves around a 13 year old girl named Madison who dies of a marijuana overdose and finds herself in Hell. It's been described as Dante's Inferno meets The Breakfast Club and I'd have to say that description isn't far off, but it's much weirder than either of those two works by far. Honestly, though, I would expect nothing less.
I thought about drawing something inspired by Damned since I just finished it, but I decided to do a Fight Club inspired picture instead just because it's his most well known novel and I wanted to draw Raph and Leo fighting. In case you're wondering in this interpretation Leo is the Narrator and Raph is Tyler Durden. Think about that one for a little while.
If you've been following this blog since the beginning you'll know that my wife and I are kind of fans of space. Earlier this year we drove to Florida with some friends in an attempt to watch one of the last shuttle launches and we spent some time at the Kennedy Space Center and Astronaut Hall of Fame. Over our lives we've collected some nice space and NASA related items and we finally decided to make some room to display them properly.
Most of our apartment is full with other awesome stuff, but our bedroom was still pretty plain so we decided to turn it into a space room! The first step in doing that was for me to hang some floating shelves on our wall to properly display some of the books and autographed photos we have. It looks pretty good if I do say so myself. So I drew Donatello doing what I was doing earlier this week. Well done, Don.
I drew this thinking it would be kinda funny to see Raph giving the finger because he's "cool but rude" but then I realized they only have two fingers and a thumb so he could just as easily be pointing up. Oh well.
I guess for this one I was thinking about how all my drawings are in pen and I wanted to do a very loose sketchy picture with only colored pencils. It's really rough, but I actually kind of like it.
Have you seen the movie Alien or the sequel Aliens? Until last night I hadn't. I've wanted to for a while I just never made it a priority, but now I have a reason. My friend, Shaun, is going to be part of a live production of the movie Aliens... on ice. That's right, Aliens on ice, like with skates. A local theater company, Old Murder House Theater, is putting it on and as soon as he saw it announced he contacted the director to offer his services. He's been watching Aliens since he was a kid and he's been skating for over ten years so it's like he was born to take part in this production. He hasn't met with them yet, but we're pretty sure he's going to be playing one of the Xenomorphs and it's going to be hilarious.
I highly recommend you check out some of this theater companies other productions to get an idea of why we're so excited about this. The only one we saw live was Back to the Future, but they've also done Die Hard, Home Alone, Robocop and Jurassic Park.
Today is November 5th and no doubt you've seen about a billion tweets and status updates about Guy Fawkes day which people only really know about because of V for Vendetta (myself included). But did you know November 5th is a special day for another reason? November 5th 1955 is the day Doc Brown slipped on his toilet while hanging a clock and get the idea for the flux capacitor. November 5th 1955 is the day time travel was invented! So go watch Back to the Future and be thankful for the great minds in science like Doc Brown.
I'm right handed, but I drew this Turtle with my left hand just to see how it would turn out. Actually I'm pretty impressed with my left-handed abilities. It took like ten times longer to draw this than it would have with my right hand, but still, it looks mostly like a Ninja Turtle, right?
Real turtles can't turn themselves back over when they fall on their backs, can Ninja Turtles? Probably, but maybe not. That's why they shouldn't ever go out alone, especially with all of that jumping and flipping. What if they get in a jam? They need at least one of their brothers there to help them out.
