ART – Get ready to Get Inspired, the Art of Richie Chavez

Simpsons Quote:

(At the museum)

Homer: Aw, why does art hate me? I never did anything to art. (notices that his arm is stuck through a painting) Uh, let’s get out of here.

Alright, so I came into work one morning and my friend Paul IMed me.

“Get ready to die,” he wrote and then attached a link.

I followed said link and died.  Turns out his friend and my acquaintance Richie Chavez had a website with his art on in and it blew our minds.

Today I’m going to share that link with you and talk a little bit about Richie.

You watch the video below or you can read what everything I say in the text below the video.  It’s the same info so you choose:

Who is Richie Chavez?

Richie Chavez is a concept artist for animated movies. He’s worked at Disney, Dreamworks, and Sony pictures, to name a few of his high profile studios.

ONE of the movies he developed art for was PRINCE OF EGYPT.  He was on of the Art Directors in that movie.

If you own the Prince of Egypt art book, you can see some of his work. Work like this:

and this one:

And here’s  a picture of Richie:

I got to know Richie because we took Kung Fu together.  We were in the same class.

He’s a really great guy, he’s a really nice guy.  In fact, I was working on a Simpsons bible story comic,  and Richie let me borrow some books he had used for reference on Prince of Egypt.  Which was very cool. I was very very handy and it was very nice of him to do that for me.

Richie’s Site

Well, it turns out that my friend and mentor Paul Wee knows him very well, because they went to school together.  Paul has been bugging Richie about getting a website up online with his work.

Well, he finally got it on up.  Richie now has his own website with his artwork and it’s mind blowing.  You’ve got to go see it. It’s such good art.

He’s got stuff from Sinbad up there that.  Oh man, it’s so awesome! The ideas and the artwork is just incredible.  That movie had sooo much potential.

There’s work from the movie Surf’s Up there too.

I actually went down to Sony when that movie was in development and had lunch with Richie and because my friend Paul where  working there at the time.  The artwork and development artwork on the movie was so incredible.  At least you get to see some of it on his site.

He worked on Hotel Transylvania, Brother Bear…among many others.

The URL is www.richardpchavez.com

Go check it out and let me know what you think.

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THE SIMPSONS NEWS – My Hiatus…or not

Last Thursday my hiatus began.  I should be back at work on May 20th.  Well…at least that was the plan.

So I go on hiatus, and quite frankly, I can’t afford to do so.  My wife and I have NOT be saving money.  Any extra money we make goes directly to getting rid of debt.  We’re trying to get rid of as much liability as we can so we can start having only assets.

The Money Problem

This basically means we’re risking it all to get rid of our debt.  So far we’re doing great.  We’ve only go one more credit card left to pay off and then we’ll tackle Alesha’s student loans.  After that, our car payments.

Anyway, the point is, we’ve got nothing saved up at all and we got hit REALLY hard last month on our property tax (remember, we live in California).  This left us without enough money to pay our mortgage. Then I’m sent on hiatus and hiatus is unpaid.

But don’t worry too much about us, our tax return helped us out.  In fact, our state tax return came a day before I was put on hiatus and it helped us pay our bills for the month, just in time.

Back to Work?

Breathing a sigh of relief I settled into my hiatus and started trying to figure out how I could get my personal projects done while still spending quality time with my kids.

Just as I was figuring all this stuff out, I get a call on Monday from work. I was asked if I could come in for two days to help out on some storyboards beginning Tuesday.  What am I going to say? No? Of course I said I was available.

I came in on Tuesday and began to work.  As I was doing my thing, one of my directors come into my office.

“Remember the Couch Gag you boarded two weeks ago? Mike Anderson gave some great notes on them, I need you to apply them for Thursday.”

“But I’m only here today and tomorrow.”

“They haven’t told you? You’re going to be here Thursday too so you can add these fixes.”

“Oh…okay then.”

A few hours later, production came in and asked me to come in on Thursday only to find out that the director had jumped the gun and told me.

So two days has now turned to three, but hey, I’m not complaining, I need the money.
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