Shapeways store is open! Puppet MUSCLE exclusive variants available NOW!

After handling the first batch of Fake Baron and Puppet MUSCLE test-shot 3D prints from Shapeways, I realised that even the more affordable plastic is not only really durable, but also provides good detail. Not as super sharp as the prototypes I use for casting rubber minis, but if the sculpt was is given deeper etching and less bitty details like shoelaces, and small locks of hair, they come out great.

Action-pose Leech-woman and Tunneler are available right now!

WHAT YA SELLIN'?

So here's a chance to offer collectors (including myself!) the best of both worlds - I'll still be producing MUSCLE-style rubber keshi with super high details on the sculpts, but there will also be the option to go to my Shapeways store and pick up variants and exclusive figures that have been modified to look great in lower resolution flexible plastic

Details like the protruding leech which are almost impossible to accomplish with a two part mold.

WHY?!

As a collector myself of most minifigure lines, I like the classic pose of MUSCLE figures and the durability of rubber (and the fact I can send rubber toys overseas at little cost to the customer), looking at figures like Brownoise's Ashurashine, there's no getting around the fact that the lack of need to make a mold means the structure and pose of the figures is limitless. Some people just prefer MIMP and Gormiti with all their variety, and dynamic poses, which are often tough or impossible to replicate with a silicone mold. Also, the colours on these bad-boys are gorgeous.

Cyber-pinhead is available now!

HOW'S IT WORK AND WHAT CAN I EXPECT?

In case you're not too familiar with this, my 3D models are uploaded to Shapeways. They will create the figures to order for the customer, and the price is based on their work, material volume, and a tiny mark-up on my end. Shapeways will make the figure, and deliver to you either from North America or Europe, depending on where you are. Orders normally take about 10 days to make and ship via UPS. It works the same way as any online store :)
I was expecting these to be brittle and feel cheap. I've dropped them a ton of times, flexed the limbs a little, and can tell you these are sturdy! Definitely more toy than model!

... All the pics in this blog are the actual products you can get from Shapeways. As I shift more and more to digital sculpting, the exclusives in this store will expand and I'll try as always to find ways to keep them as affordable as possible.

Whoo-hoo!

Fake Baron Keshi AND Puppet MUSCLEs  are in my store now.

 I'm massively satisfied with the project for 2 reasons - It's doing well, and it's my first run of figures I've sculpted digitally and cast off a 3D print. Being highly self critical, unless I spend crazy hours on something, I'm never sure if I've done a good job. I wasn't even going to make Treegarr until Ben Spencer (Galaxxor) encouraged me to.

... but I just love these figures. I would buy them!!

The limited neon run of Tunneler and Blade are very low in number now, and the flesh variants I'll keep doing until the molds die.


 Sculpting digitally is the most exciting move I've made since buying a pressure pot and learning how to cast nicely. It really gets your imagination pumping when you know what you can do. 3D printing has become awesome and affordable already. I love it!
 Being able to sculpt with CTRL+Z as an option is awesome. I'm sure there are many that would argue that it takes the "soul" out of it. But to be frank, some of the most artistically accomplished indie toys I've seen have had no love given to them, because they weren't pitched quite the right way, or they didn't get endorsed by the right people. I feel like going digital has given me freedom to work in more ways, and do more with the sculpts - print them in different scales/ materials, edit them, and so on. The term "art" in art-toys is thrown around willy nilly anyway. Popularity schlopuratity. Making what I want and people buying it anyway is the best reward I can hope for.

Toys I've made/am making. Wanna read about 'em?

Holla.

Hello to all the Russian bots that loyally check out my blog. It means a lot me.

Sorry as usual for people who like a bit of insight and/or aren't huge social media users for neglecting my blog. Here's what's been happening.

SHOGUNASTY.

He's in my store.

AND

For US customers wanting cheap shipping and to get him alongside other figures in the Unbox Industries Strange Monsters line, you can get him at the LITTLE RUBBER GUYS store.

We had enough made that I knew they'd last but numbers are now getting very limited, with numbers getting very low at the LRG in this military green.

When something's hard to make and you don't want to charge much, it's puts you in a spot. That's the point where art toys get expensive, or else people make themselves a one-off and leave it there. That's the small dilemma I have with this destroyed Nagoya diorama base I've made.

I know mini figure peeps like stuff that looks like a classic MIMP or MUSCLE, not a statue or a model. So i'll probably set up a pre-order for this fully painted version down the road when I get time. I dunno if anyone gets as much of a kick out of cracked roads and sections of river with a yellow speedboat on a base as I do.

DAY OF THE SLUG 3.

The slug invasion continues with 2 evil portal invaders by Jimmy Rommel, and 2 heroes by myself. Sir Slythe has chased the demon slugs through a time portal a-la Ash from the Evil Dead to the present day and been joined by the drill-nosed Miner Disaster in an attempt to thwart the growing evil slug invasion.

his time around, it's a purely pre-order system. I like making the one offs and if no one bought them, I'd be happy to fill my own shelves with them, but due to the cost of printing the cards and the amount of time I put into the artwork, it's been a labor of love I never expected to make any money from. However, for the hardcore that collect them, I will continue the line as promised for at least 4 waves.

PUPPET MUSCLES!!!

I cannot stress how effing happy I am with this project. Got rubber copies cooking in the pot right now!

Let me start by telling you how deeply ingrained Puppet Master movies are into my psyche and how deeply I link them with MUSCLE figures.

Picture this - 1989. A weird little boy with a fat head, Hawaiian shirts, neon socks and laces, and a skateboard with a torch taped to the front ventures a mile from his house to the video shop where him mum's best mate works. She's a nice lady but has no concept of rules, laws, or what's suitable for kids. She let me take out any video I wanted for free. Puppet Master was my favorite film. I didn't really get the story - I just liked how creepy the puppets were. I always had fantasies about going to the toy shop and seeing ANYTHING to do with Puppet Master in there. Minifigures would have been perfect. I played with MUSCLEs in my little shoebox city I made with Puppet Master on pirated VHS in the background, between playing in the woods, playing Double Dragon at the leisure center, and trying to be inappropriate with the girls next door.

I have distinct memories of using Screw-kid as a stalker in the Puppet Master style, for my larger figures in horror scenarios.

Anyway, enough waffle. Here's what I've been doing.

I learned Z-brush. It is the future. I don't think I could ever sculpt this much detail on a mini with the skills I have.

I printed some test shots in  plastic from Shapeways to see the scale/standability. They were a bit small.

I printed super high detail copies at 20% larger and made molds.

I am making rubber copies. These will be available as soon as I have enough of a buffer to meet demand. These are 100% unofficial! Not endorsed by anybody other than me - just a genuinely loving tribute to 2 things that are dear to my heart.


FAKE BARON KESHI

I was asked by Awesome Toy in Hong Kong if I'd like to make a toy based on his Fake Baron vinyls. I was just getting to grips with Zbrush at the time and saw it as a great chance to learn some tricks and make something cool. There were molded from a high detail print and cast in red rubber. So far only available in East Asia at conventions, but I hope to be able to make flesh runs, neon runs, etc down the road soon. Awesome Toy is a legitimate and busy company so how long that takes is down to when they get time to market it I suppose. Hope it's soon! To all the people that already know about this and have been asking re: availability. I won't leave you hanging - just out of my hands right now :)

TREEGARR MINISTATUE

One of these left. Only for the hardcore! My first 3D sculpt, kindly printed by my good friend and fellow pervert Fernando Rijpkema, and smoothed and painted by me. The Treevil one stomping across the bloody rocks of the Fright Zone!

ROLL OUT ROLL CALL (the UK TF, GI JOE, and MOTU convention)

I know it doesn't do me any favors, but I can't help but be put off by any element of elitism in the arts. Especially indie arts. And especially toys. It has to be fun and friendly or I'm just not interested. I've met enough charlatans to know nothing matters but the work. And insincere sycophancy has been rife in every endeavor I've been involved in.

Which is why I had an amazing time at this year's  RORC as a guest. I was in a room with a bunch of absolutely stellar toys designers/makers. I was happy to be representing Mystical Warriors of the Ring on my table too. Made some legit friends that I know I'll stay in touch with.

I didn't get to go to any of the presentations as I was manning the table, but I had enough fun chatting to people who buy my stuff, people who are just starting out with toymaking, and perving on cosplay girls. The free coffee and excellent banter made the 2 days fly by. Good times!

"Oller", from Ironhaus Pro x Bigman Toys

A good while ago, Jimmy Rommel of Ironahus Pro and I were talking about doing a collab. I generally spend more time on 5.5" scale fantasy figures, whereas Jimmy's been a mainstay of the indy minifigure scene for longer than BMT has been going. Good news for 5.5 AND minifigure fans - Oller is a 5" static sculpt by Jimmy that comes with a minifigure companion....

 Cystoidz! Dirty, dangerous, cysts that serve the barbarian in his adventures through space. For more info on the backstory and more pictures, go to Jimmy's blog, here: http://ironhauspro.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/oller-from-ironhaus-pro-x-bigman-toys.html

DROPPING AUGUST 1ST, 23:00 LONDON TIME,  18:00 EDT, IN THE BMT STORE, PRICED AT JUST $40 EACH. BLINDBAGGED RANDOMLY COLORED CYSTOID INCLUDED!

Fugg the Slayer, Boss Krang, ZBrush and Shogunasty.

It's been another long period of collaborations and biz going on in the background. I miss having the time to make the blog as personal as I used to make it. I was recently talking with a friend of mine who runs a few businesses and he told me one of the keys to doing so well for him, was checking his mails only on certain days. Especially in indy arts based stuff, I find you can spend more time e-mailing, social media, and forums than you do actually MAKING the thing you want to sell.

FUGG THE SLAYER

I don't get enough time to wax lyrical about what a lot of this stuff means to me as I don't want to sound like an arse-kisser BUT working with Galaxxor has always been immensely satisfying for two reasons - One is that Ben Spencer is undoubtedly the most universally supportive guy in the indy 5.5 resin figure scene, which is a pretty big effing scene! There's stuff made in factories that would likely have never beeb thought of if it weren't for the garage resin guys. COTU (RobHexevo/ Ro3co) influenced all of us I'm certain, but Ben encouraged and advised me on making Treegarr, which was successful enough to give me faith to jump feet first into toymaking.
The other thing is that Ben's figures have always sold well and been respected as he's never half arsed any of them. The colors of the belts, boots, studs, and all that stuff are extremely carefully considered and the sculpts themselves are neat, great designs.

I won't harp on about Fugg here, I'll let you read about him from Mr Galaxxor himself: http://galaxxor.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/fugg-slayer-coming-soon-from-galaxxor-x.html


BOSS KRANG (Available in my store NOW!! Link at top of page)

So a couple of months ago, My freind Enzo approached me about contributing to the recent Boss Krang show at the Acme Superstore in Florida. Again, it was just a pure pleasure for me. I contributed a canvas at first, then Enzo asked (while I was conventiently home sick) if I wanted to use my static 5.5 buck to make some Boss Krang figured based on a custom someone has made with a MOTUC buck. I sculpted the belt and harnesses using straps and casteline, and added pegs and holes to attach them all together on the figure. The other parts are bootleggaroonies. Hands are cast in rubber so they can hold the weapons without ever snapping. A BITCH to make and I won't be doing any more. Happy to keep the number to 5 so that the few people who own them know they have something special which I really think this figure is.

SHOGUNASTY
I've mentioned before about the Strange Monsters project with Unbox Industries (also featuring, Zectron, Trutek, and Ironhaus/ Jimmy Rommel), and my contribution, Shogunasty. I'm thrilled to get this thing out there. I've had this vision of a moving mutant castle in my head for years. I lived in Japan for 3 and a half years altogether and used to work out near the Imperial Palace. I used to walk around the outside quite a bit and have nerdy little fantasies in my head about filming some kind of schlocky horror/action film there. I also love kaiju/sentai shows where the costume is clearly making it tough for the guy inside to walk. So that's the design of Shogunasty. A guy in a very tough to walk in, mutant castle costume.
Then there's the fact we'll be able to sell our figures in matching colorways and at a super affordable price is the cherry on the cake. Art toys are often worth a lot of money because of the work that went into them, BUT as someone who is poor as arse most of the time, I'm really really happy to have a very cool, very high quality toy I can sell to pretty much anyone who wants one at a price they can afford. It's very cool of Unbox to reach out to this niche of indy toymakers and help us make this happen. Anyway, expect Strange Monsters to be available SOON!

ZBRUSH

I no longer take large resin commissions of other people's work as I want to give as many hours to Zbrush as I can. 3D printing is the shizznit, there's no getting around it. There are things that you accomplish in clay that are difficult in Zbrush definitely, but as of yet, I've doinf nothing that I consider impossible. You can sculpt almost as tactliley with Zbrush if you have the right hardware as you can with real clay, putty,  or wax, and then there's the fact that you can switch the dimensions to 2D, render lighting, create hard edges that'd be near impossible with a real model to do, to make toys, games and comics, and we all like those, right?!

I'm still a noob-poop at this but here's some of my stuff. The application i'm most recenly excited by is the ability to take a 3D model and turn it into a 2D pen-and-ink style illstration. Here's my Treegarr model with a sketch render, and then literally 5 minutes worth of playing with in Photoshop.

Battleground Evil-lyn Customs dropping tonight!

Battleground Evil Lyn

$70.00 

DROPPING 22:00 LONDON TIME/ 17:00 EASTERN.

Sorry to the Russian bots that give my blog most of it's traffic for not updating more often. I really haven't gotten the word out about these at all.!

I managed to get together the 3 final good wo-man resin pulls I have in my possession and use them to make custom versions of my interpretation of what a Filmation style Battleground Evil-Lyn would look like. These have posable arms and right wrist. For purposes of prtoecting the paint job, the neck is not posable on these. If you ever thought about getting yourself a Wo-man variant, this might be the last chance. The molds are dead and I've got a big ol' backlog of stuff to catch up on.

Cheers!

Day of the Slug Wave II, dropping Saturday!

As promised, the 16 figures a year cheap-o indie minifig series continues with 4 new guys for Spring; Slugger Pusbottom the olde time pugilist, Latherface the chainsaw weilding maniac, Portal Mage, and his accomplace/vehicle/abode, the Portal Slug.

Trading cards are currently being printed for these 4 but they'll be available in the store by saturday.

Of all 4 this time, my persoinal favortie is the portal slug, due to the fact he is a stand alone figure, but can also accomodate another mini. I sculpted a ton of stuff onto him too.

From now on, value 4 packs will be available in any opaque color to order, in resin or rubber.

"

DROPPING APRIL 25TH, 23:00 GMT.
All RUBBER unless stated otherwise!
BUY A SET OF 4 IN ANY SELECTION OF DIFFERENT COLORS AND GET ONE OF THEM FREE (VIA REFUND).
CHEAP - O INTERNATIONAL SHIPPING! $5 for the first figure and just $1 for each additional!
TRADING CARD OPTION - CLICK: HERE
Intelligent slugs are not new to Earth. They're just small enough for us to not know about them. From the telekinetic deep sea nudibranch elders, to the hard-mantled terrestrial gastropod mollusc, their secrets are finally revealed - forcing them out into the open to live alongside, or battle mankind!!
- 4 Slugs per wave, 4 waves per year. That's 16 slugs to be released GUARANTEED in year one!
- Available in rubber or resin!"

Los Guerreros Transformados!

So, after at least 2 years of looking through my collection at the solid rubber 5.5 bootlegs I have in there and wanting to make some myself, I've done it!

I couldn't decide on whether to make something fantasy themed, or finally get round to doing some luchadores, so I thought if I take a vintage buck and re-sculpt the boots etc to make it plain, I can not only do both, but make them the same figure. All you need to do is swap the heads.

Cleaning rubber figures is no walk in the park. There are people who refuse to do resin, and some who refuse to do rubber. Rubber doesn't snap, and resin looks (in my opinion) better. You can sand it, gloss it, etc, to a much finer finish than you can rubber. But there are tricks you can use to get rubber looking smooth. So I've used my keshi tricks on the bodies and made the heads out of resin in an assortment of different colors. No 2 figures are the same.

I've also made these the cheapest 5.5s I've ever done. I want these to be affordable army builders people can pick up and play with, put MOTU armor on, swap the heads, and have fun with, without worrying about knocking it off the shelf.

I've also painted the header card in acrylics in a similar style to bootleg toys from Mexico. Pretty happy with the overall look - like a pound shop find of a lifetime!

Given the playability of these and the fact that they can sit on any steed and hold any weapon, I'm already shopping for paint that'll stick to PU rubber so I can carry on with my Golden Axe inspired line. It deserves more!

DROPPING SAT 28TH FEB @ MIDNIGHT LONDON TIME! (Store link at top)

Phallofax - the penile villain that took 3 years to perfect!

The unspeakable one. Over stimulated to the point of total penile biped chaos. Toxic flesh spasms, with what's left of the clean blood in him surging to the extremeties. Erect, deadly, and out to destroy all competing male cock.

If you go wayyyyy back to the first few months of this blog, you will see one or two fairly crude resin/vintage parts mashup versions I did of Phallofax. Since passing what I had left of my resin pulls to Goodleg Toys and working on molds with them, they have taken the ultimate in extreme action figures and released a series of killer Battlegaze figures leading up to this - a 100x improved remastering of the first resin I ever pulled from a pot.

DROPPING JAN 12th @ 11PM GMT +1 (Berlin time) at THE GOODLEGTOYS STORE

Treegarr. Back Thursday. With friends...

For a limited run of 3 a piece, Bigmantoys' flagship 5.5" Etherian superbeast is back, Thursday the 15th @ midnight London time. In a blood red, and Totally Toxic colorway.

Moribund sold out fast in his first wave of 10 slime green and 10 white, so here he is again in Punk Pink, for  a limited run. He looks fucking killer!

Finally, Chicken Leg is back in slime green for just $55! First time he's been available in a non-classic colorway.

Thanks to everyone who's bought a variant of these guys and Wo-man over the years. They've been the backbone of Bigmantoys and encourage me to keep pushing over the years.

Cheers!