Totoro Forest Auction Recap & new interviews with Side Bar Nation and CreatureDesign.org.

We're back from the auction and it was amazing... here's a little recap of our trip.

So on Friday Kei and I flew out to San Francisco to attend the Totoro Forest Auction the next day. Bill Presing picked us up and had a lovely dinner with him and his beautiful fiancee Ikumi. Nice, quiet and relaxing. Just looked through his book collection and talked about art all night.

Saturday we had breakfast in the park and for lunch we met up with Lorne Lanning and he told us about some of his crazy adventures back in the day. Mind blowing stuff. Unfortunately those are not my stories to tell so I wouldn't feel right going into any details.

Later at around 5pm we all went to the auction at Pixar. Kei and I spent most of our time meeting the fabulous artists that contributed to the show and getting them to sign our Totoro Forest book. It felt like I was back in high school and it was year book time or something but we didn't care. This was a once in a life time opportunity and I will cherish that book forever :)

In the beginning of the night, Kei and I tried to bid on a bunch of pieces in the silent auction like Peter DeSeve's, Herman Mejia's but were always out bid.

In the live auction we had a little bidding war for Luc Desmarchelier's painting, Enrico Casarosa's, Dice's, Luis Grane's and a bunch of others but each time we were out bid. We did however end up coming home with Lou Romano's piece "BB & Me"! Well, actually we only came home with a certificate saying that we bought it. The real painting will be displayed in a museum for a few months before coming to it's new home in Canada. We'll take good care of it Lou! What a nice guy. He came over to talk to us after the live auction.


But the highlight of the night was when my friends came up to me and told me that John Lasseter bought my "Twins" print! When I was 16, my first real job was designing Pixar toys in Canada and ever since then John Lasseter has been a hero of mine so it was a true honor to have him purchase my painting and a dream come true to talk with him and shake his hand.


Bobby Chiu and John Lasseter :)

Thank you to everyone we met at the auction for making this weekend one of the most memorable nights of our lives. A special thanks to Dice, Ronnie, Enrico and everyone else involved in the show. Also a special thanks to Bill & Ikumi, Lorne & Sherry for letting us stay with them. It was amazing and the book turned out incredible. A must have.

Bobby

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On a side note here's a couple of new interviews:


Side Bar (sidebarnation.com) has done an MP3 audio interview with me so check it out HERE

For all my Russian speaking friends out there, CREATUREDESIGN.org has put up an interview I did with them. You can read it HERE