Finally! The finished Whoville Family Portrait that I have been working on for the past couple of days. The drawing is going to compliment our already epic Christmas door decoration we have going on for a contest at work. As I’ve mentioned in my Twitter feed, there are two trained graphic designers working on this thing (including me). The good, and bad, thing about the two of us is that we think pretty much exactly alike when it comes to design, so a simple project that should take some tape and a pencil turns into a foamboard sculpted fireplace complete with stockings, a log, wreath, family portrait (charactures of everyone in our department, btw) and a Grinch arm coming to steal everything. Oh, did I mention we don’t even work in the “art department” officially. We work in production and we plan on stuffing that in the faces of those artsy fartsy art department bastards! (The pumpkin contest on Halloween left a bad taste in our mouths concerning the art department).

Yes, the wreath is real – complete with a bell in the middle. The log (unfortunately) is not real. The mantle of the fireplace is about half the door size and I gotta say looks pretty well crafted. If we don’t win this thing I’m gonna quit working there. (Ok, probably not, but I will stomp around and kick dirt for a couple of days.)

At any rate, below is the portrait going on the mantle. We have to assemble the final decoration tonight so I’ll post pics here and on Twitter when we get it done. Merry Christmas and watch out for the Grinch

As promised, below is a great photo of the finished Christmas door that my department decorated at work. The photo was taken by a professional photographer we have that runs cameras as well part time and he’s amazing (this photo looks like it belongs in a magazine).

If you need an explanation, the scene obviously depicts the moment right after the Grinch has stolen Christmas from Cindy Lou Who. Of course we added a few of our own touches (like the family portrait) to make it out own. All in all I think the door came out beautifully.

As expected (well, we actually expected to win to be honest) we did not win the contest, but we came in second behind – get this – the engineering department. The creative department came in dead last (tee hee). I see this as a win for us though, our rivals – though the creative department doesn’t really understand this yet – were defeated in a painfully bloody way (we kicked their asses)! Of course, since it’s the Christmasy thing to do, I’ll say that all of the doors looked nice and it really does help to spruce up the station a bit.

At any rate, enjoy the photo and thanks for indulging my silliness while we worked on this contest. One last thing, I have to credit my fellow graphic designer and co-worker, Karen Hurlebusch, with most of the actual crafting work on this, I was mainly on this one as a concept artist and characturist