Bert "gatchabert" Gatchalian

So, Super 7 is hosting a custom Mummy Boy show with a contest attached to it. Each entry will be for sale and both regular and pocket sized Mummy Boys will be up. It should be a great show and I'm pretty excited to see what others are going to do. Some have already finished their pieces. I've posted a teaser on flickr but I'm posting the actual piece here for you guys that read my blog. I based the colors on a vintage toy but tweaked the colors a bit. I'm happy with what I painted and I'd be glad to keep this guy in my collection.

Using a stripped Kozik Pickle Chaos, I decided to try out some new paint...which happens to be almost the same colors as the old Pickle Chaos...

On October 8th in Boston, various monsters will invade Lot F Gallery. The show will feature people that use Monster Kolor paints. For the show, I painted 3 toys.

This one is from Maxtoy Co. It is their Drazoran, painted in a more traditional style. Painted with blue, green, silver, purple and some brown on milky/clear glitter vinyl. I had painted a Drazoran before but I didn't like how it turned out so after sitting around for a few years, I repainted it to this version which I think is much better. It will be on sale for $150.

Nothing fancy with this one, just wanted to paint the toy into an Oni.

Super Cooper has invited me to participate in a show at Munky King called, Stop It! Cooper says "The art show is about school bullying and cyber-bullying. It is to raise awareness to stop bullying!" and will open on Sept 10th from 6pm-10pm. Part of the sales will go to GLIDE (Gays and Lesbians Initiating Dialogue for Equality) and CHIME Institute. I wish I was able to make it to the show, at least I'll be there in Spirit :)

It's that time again for Toy Karma at Rotofugi curated by Mark Nagata of Max Toy Co. Knocked out 2 drawings for the show. Both are 8"x10" drawings. The first one is taken from the James Bond movie, For Your Eyes Only.

It's that time of the year...well every other year...for Toy Karma 3 at Rotofugi, curated by Mark Nagata of Max Toy Co. This time the format is very different. Custom toys are only painted by the manufacturer or the creator of the toy and no one else. That means people like me can't send in custom painted toys. However, I am able to send in drawings or paintings that are kaiju themed/inspired. I'm kinda happy about that and thought about what to make. I wanted to have Mark's character, Lady Maxx in the drawing but wasn't sure what to do with her. Then it hit me...

So today I finally got to try Himawari in San Mateo during lunch time. We were pretty lucky when we got there and only waited for about 5 minutes for a table. Small place, I think Santa Ramen is bigger but bigger is not always better. I had tonkotsu with extra kakuni...what I like to call the pork medley. One thing to note before I go on. After we were sat down, we were given glasses of what I thought was water. As it turns out, it was barley tea...and cold. It was both odd and refreshing, and a few minutes after taking our order, my ramen arrives. You could see the fat glistening on the top of the soup and at the first sip, I knew this was going to be good and it was. Each sip had nice flavor and you could even get a hint of sake when you take a bite of the kakuni. That really makes me want to come back. The bowl itself seems to be a bit high in price at around $9...then you add .50cents-$3 more depending on what you add. The bbq pork was also good but no match for the kakuni's flavor and more sips of the soup and still no saltiness. The noodles were thin but had a nice bite to them. I like a bit thicker noodle but these did the job well enough that I wasn't missing the thicker ones. By the end of it all, I found no saltiness, some really good kakuni, and sweat from having my face near the bowl the whole time I was eating. I had to take off my hoodie. I need to bring some other friends so we can try the karaage as well as the other soups.

Tonight it just struck me how we all take something like the internet for granted. A few years ago, there was nothing like the internet and the only way we could show someone on the other side of the world something, was to send them a picture. Now, it's almost instant...or can be instant depending on what you use to connect. It really struck me when I posted the pic below on twitter and tagged the owner of the company to show him the custom paint job I did on one of his toys. Here's the toy I painted:

I just received the Kibou prints from Monster Worship and they look great. They will go on sale soon for $35 and will be signed and numbered and all the sales will go to Japanese earthquake relief (like Japanese Red Cross ).
One note: the line work is rough because it is meant to be that way ;)

So I was asked by my former manager if I could make a little drawing for her. She was a great boss and I do owe her...but even if I didn't, I'd still help her out. Spring cleaning is coming up and she needed a small drawing of Pogo's mascot. At first I thought it was going to be a small poster but then she says it's going on her email. That's great cause then I can make a drawing on 8.5"x11" paper, scan it and then resize it smaller. With spring here, she just needed Spike doing some kind of cleaning chore...so, here is Spike :)

A contest from Grasshut just ended and the competition was top-notch. Bwana had posted some time ago that there would be a contest and the topic was Globby and our interpretation of the cute fella. Here are some of the entries:

Well...since a friend of mine decided to take screencaps of my other submissions, I might as well show them. I had the pics set so only friends would see them. I can't do anything if friends ignore that setting.

This is one of my pieces for the show this weekend. It is Gameppa by Gargamel, one of my favorite fight figures of Gargamel's line. There seems to only be a handful of people that collect fight figures and that sucks. Companies like Secret Base and Gargamel have just about stopped making their fight figures. Secret Base still does but releases are at a much slower pace. Oh well, no sense in supporting a dying market :(

So I was going through some events listed in my Facebook tabs and clicked on the All Hands On Deck show. It's a fundraiser and proceeds go the building a skate park in Jamestown NY. Click, click, click and all of a sudden I see the skate deck I painted for the show on the front of the webpage:

January 8th, 2011. The first show for us in the new year. Thanks to Dragatomi for putting the show together and just being awesome people, and thanks to everyone that came up to check out the show.

Pics from my flickr: Dragatomi Monster Party

So I finally got to try Ajisen Ramen and while I wasn't expecting much, I wasn't disappointed...but maybe cause I wasn't expecting much. I got the house ramen...Ajisen Ramen for $7.50. From what I could see and taste (cause there wasn't much description in the menu), it had seaweed, half and egg, shreds of lettuce and some...well, a but more than some, garlic in tonkotsu broth, and some pieces of pork. The ramen itself wasn't bad. Thin noodles with a bit of bite to it. The broth was ok but the garlic was a bit too much. The lettuce...well...it didn't add to the ramen so why was it even there? The pork wasn't too bad. Just dry enough to sop up some of the broth and some nice bit of flavor. I like that this place is downtown so if I ever find myself there, I know there's a ramen place I can go to. Overall, it was a good bowl for the price and I would probably go here over the highly overrated ramen place that is also downtown on Geary :P. Service was a bit lacking. I went with my brother and we waited almost 10min for the server to take our order. After we had ordered, my brother got his before me...which is odd cause he got tonkatsu. Really? You can fry a pork cutlet faster than you can make ramen? I didn't know that was possible.

Come join us on December 11th 2010 for Love Movement at New People's Superfrog gallery in San Francisco.

So I managed to get into a fundraiser show in Jamestown NY. Here's a blurb about the show on the Active Artists Alliance webpage:

"All Decks on Hand" AAAlliance X Suburban Blend X Arts Council Fundraiser Show / Auction of skateboard decks, designed and hand-painted by local, regional, and national artists. 100% of the proceeds from this show will go towards the new Public Skatepark Project in Jamestown, NY. This show will hang for the months of January & February.

Rather than prep the skateboard, I painted directly on to it...sort of how Kabuki make-up is. You can still see some of the board through the paint and the lines are a little imperfect, but from a bit of a distance, it looks more crisp.

I got to try Ramen Club out in Burlingame a couple of days ago. It was okay. People have said that it is hit or miss and I guess we were right in the middle. I ordered the Stewed Pork Ramen and didn't ask what the soup flavor was. They have 3 kinds, shio, shoyu, and miso. The bowl came and had the stewed pork, about 3-4 pieces of a decent size each, half a hard boiled egg, and seaweed. The pork was ok. Nice and tender but not as much flavor as Santa Ramen or Saiwaii's stewed pork. The noodles were okay. They had a nice bite to them. The soup...well, it had nice flavor to it but it was more the flavor of the stewed pork. Not sure if that's suppose to be but if it wasn't for the pork sitting in the broth, I don't think I would have ordered it. There was also a bit of sourness in the soup. I'm not one to try a place and never go back if I didn't like it or think much of it...unless it is absolutely terrible. I'll give Ramen Club another shot someday and try the shoyu or shio ramen. For now, it's just okay. There was really nothing special about their ramen, nothing memorable but at least it wasn't terrible.

Some one was complaining on yelp that the egg she got in her ramen was raw. Really?!?!