Friday night Tammy and I hit Disneyland. We ate at the somewhat reasonably-priced Carnation Cafe and I scored dining pin #2 for my collection.

After dinner it was a quick walk over to the Disney Gallery in New Orleans Square to check out the new 100 Mickeys exhibit. Lemmie tell ya, Eric Robison has got to be sick of Mickey by now. It was pretty hard to find a surface in the gallery that didn’t have one of his hundred paintings on it somwheere. Every piece was truly unique, and there were a handful that I was tempted to purchase, but I showed some restraint and walked away empty handed. (I wasn’t about to drop a few thousand on any of the originals.)

You can view all 100 here. The tiny scans don’t give you any idea of how many different media were used in the creation of each piece, nor can you see any of the textures of the materials used. One Mickey was charcoal on cardboard, another was made by scratching through wax with a paper clip, and another was a larger-than-life “throw handfulls of paint on the wall and somehow make it look like Mickey” piece. You really have to see these things in person to get an idea of just how much work went in to making all 100.

The print-on-demand pricing is pretty much what I expected. A 36″x48″ print is $45 on art paper, or $150 on canvas. You pick the image that you’d like to own, tell them the size and type of paper you’d like to have it printed on, and they then print it on a twelve thousand dollar HP DesignJet 5000ps printer in the back room. You can then pick up your print later in the day, or you can have it FedExed to you for free.

The canvas prints look a whole lot better than I thought they would. They catch the light and reflect it back at you just like a real oil painting! The only thing you lose is the texture, and that’s only visible up close.

On Saturday night, Tammy and I went to Josh’s surprise birthday party at Dave & Buster’s in Orange. A good time was had by all. Drinks and dinner in the bar were followed up by hot arcade game action and finally an all-out karaoke extravaganza. We left shortly after that, and I was almost too tired to drive us home. I made it though!

Sunday we looked around at some more places in Redondo Beach (mostly overpriced dumps this time) and Tammy logged a few more hours in her Final Fantasy efforts.

Today I am tired. They’re going to start digging up the concrete right next to our office window today, so I’m looking forward to that.