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.
