About Me

I am a professional graphic designer and right now I am moon lighting as a toy customizer. Every waking minute outside of work I commit to painting and sculpting custom toys.

Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Weekend Update

Had a long weekend with a lot of work and a fair amount of relaxing. Friday night I finished the 6th gig poster for a series of posters that I've been printing for local shows and it turned out great. The headlining band Nigredo is awesome.

Nigredo

They're described as ambient, experimental rock and I have to say they destroyed Jacks on saturday. And here is the final poster. 4 color build with a 5th transparent layer for the type on top.


Saturday morning we got up early packed a bunch of toys up and did some serious shipping. I got all of my Pinky and the Brain bots out to their future owners, Chad I mailed you your Paw box, and Hustin...your Storms are on the way. Jay, I sent you your elements and your prize from the raffle the 1 and only Rasp custom 3A bot. Upon leaving the PO Amanda tells me some friends are coming over and we're headed to the pool...alright, I had things to do but I didn't mind. We sat and drank and relaxed by the pool for a few hours and obviously after that I needed a nap. Woke up JUST barely in time for the show, ran over there and hung out til real late watching all the bands and trying to sell some posters. Sold a few but it being Memorial Day weekend the crowd was a little sparse. But the bands totally ruled. 

Here are a few pics to tease!




Finally saw the Avengers and it kicked major ass. It was so good. Thor, Iron Man and Hulk are pure bad asses. Cap, Hawkeye and Black Widow are alright but compared to the others they're a bit limited. 
I printed some shirts for a co-worker last night and then it was back to the grind. Only 6 weeks until my wedding and my 2 week vacation to Hawaii so I need to knock out a bunch of commissions, finish my invitations, start and finish the Cyberman box suit, print the N3rdLink t-shirts and a whole bunch of there stuff. Very busy over here!!!


Wednesday, May 23, 2012

New Print

There's yet another show this weekend. Because of Cinco de Mayo there was no show at the beginning of the month so there are back to back shows. Trying something I've never done with a print and hopefully it doesn't go afoul...I'm attempting a 4 color build print, meaning I took a photograph and did the separations in photoshop and will be printing semi transparent inks in a CMYK build, with a 5th color on top that is intended to be a spot varnish, so essentially a clear layer over the black that will give it a gloss black on black look.

The headliner is a band named Nigredo which means "The dark night of the soul" and I immediately though of space. I found this super dope image of the horizon over earth and all the black space just looked perfect to me. Gonna be a smaller run of 16 this time around and hopefully I can get the registration perfect on these. I'm adding registration marks for once and not gonna try and eyeball it anymore.


Monday, May 21, 2012

Weekend Update

I spent all weekend working on this new screen print for my friends show and finishing up the Pinky and the Brain mascots that I am making for the Good vs. Evil bots series. The print was a super rush job and I got way too ambitious with the colors and the drawing. I didn't have time to do the color separations properly so there were a lot of missed trappings ( Overlapping colors), a typo, and grime here and there from the screens. I was literally finishing the drawing, burning and printing from 10 AM until 9:30 at night, ran off to the show, got home at 1 AM and saw the typo. FUCK!!!! Since then I have made all the adjustments and will be redoing them next week. This is the final drawing and I need to be better about setting up registration marks.

I also finished my Pinky and the Brain mascots just last night and I think they look sweet. I did an original sculpt for Pinky and cast the head only, and I did a 1 off sculpt for Brain. I wanted brain to be smaller so I cut off the feet and resculpted them from scratch so he is slightly shorter than Pinky...though he has a huge head. There are no AP's or anything but I have already been sued to make 8" versions of them.
Hope you guys like.

Back to commissions, wedding invitations, stuff for N3rdlink and SDCC, the Cyberman suit I'm making for my friend Geoff Cuddy — that's right, a cardboard Cyberman — and he will be sporting it at comic con. Only 10 weeks until comic con and my wedding and so much to do.


The tulip tattoo is Amandas actual tattoo though that is not her, but she did pose so I could get a pic of her ink.



Pics of all new stuff to come soon.

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Back to Work

I finished my pieces for Most Wanted just in the nick of time and got them shipped out. I cost a lot to ship them overnight but it really wasn't as much as I thought it would be. For the 20" Dunny and other stuff which weight 20 lbs it was $86.00 with $2000 insurance. I expected it to be a lot more and it really was only like 20 bucks more than priority.

Now I'm working on my Bot's mini run that I'm doing for the Good vs. Evil series and I need to get that that done by tomorrow night. The pre-sale for that on the KR board is on Friday and I think the official drop will be soon there after. In case you didn't see it I'm doing Pinky and the Brain from Animaniacs. I thought it would be a nice contrast to the super evil stuff the rest of my team is doing and I got to do some fun sculpting. Pinky and Brain are cute but still definitely evil.


Pinky is gonna be the standard and Brain is gonna be the 1 off chase.  The painting is gonna be fairly simple, white and pink, so the sculpting is gonna make these guys sing. I'm having trouble getting Brains head to be the right shape but I'll get there. 

I want to try and finish repairing a few 8" Dunny's that I have on my desk and get those back to their owners, and I have a crap load of other things to try and knock out. I promise I will get to Striders box ASAP, I will  finish and finally ship the 3 Storms, The Samurai Gundam Dunny is close to being done, I have Perseus and the gang in a whole range of WIP stages, The Muppets, Voldemort, Spartan, 8" Yeti, M.C. Escher, and I have a bunch of sketches to do. With the wedding coming up and all this to do on top of that, I'm a busy guy. Not stressed though... I like being busy.

On a side note, we finally found a Seinfeld trivia here in town. For the longest time I've been touting myself as a Seinfeld savant. When I was single and living in a 200 sq ft. apartment with no tv, all I did was watch Seinfeld on DVD on my computer. I mean literally, nothing else. And I retained a shit load of random information; names, dates, phrases, occurrences — and the absolute beating I put on that trivia game last night was oh so sweet affirmation that I am indeed a Seinfeld master. It was only 1 week, but, the questions started out fairly easy and got progressively harder, and by the end of the show, we hadn't missed a single question...and some of them were super hard. We'll see how we do next week... but if this continues, the other teams are gonna hate us.

The bonus question consisted of 5 questions. If you got it right you got 5 points, if you got it wrong you lost 5 points, and if you left it blank nothing happened. We left 2 of them blank and those were the only things I didn't know. 1, I just plain didn't know, and the other I was unsure of. And they were:

1 - What is in the back seat of the car that Kramer is test driving?
2 - What is Jerry's girlfriend Janes profession

The other 3 that I knew were:

1 - What is Elaines boyfriend Jack better known as?
2 - What is Jerry on so and so's moms speed dial?
3 - What is Jerry's apt # from Season 3 – 9

There were questions throughout the game that were harder than these 3 bonus questions. Basically at the end of the game we were beating the 2nd place team by 11 its which amounted to probably 3 questions that stumped the other teams.

Can't wait for next week to test my knowledge even more.



Tuesday, May 8, 2012

Most Wanted Pieces

Alright folks here is the lineup I've got coming for the MW show. Having slept about 3 hrs total in the last  60 hours I have just about completed the 20" and her accompanying 8". I am going to have to finish the 3" and the mini that go with it and ship them separately with the rest of the stuff because I just have to get this 20" in the mail. I DO NOT want to ship it express bc/ it'll end up costing way too much. Those 4 pieces will all be sold as 1 piece and all 4 designs are different. The 20" is a new design, the 8" is the same design as the figure from the series, the 3" is a new design, and the mini zipper pull is the same as the one from the series. I will also have an 8" version of the 20" and if I have time there might be a couple 1 off 3" Arrrr-Mandas. No pics yet... but if all goes according to plan I will be shooting the army and a bunch of the other pieces tonight. I will definitely be shooting the 20" before I pack it up and ship it.

This is the one and only time I will be making any pieces based on the Arrrr-Manda design so if you dig them you'd better try and grab them from the show. I really don't know what to expect in terms of sales. The 3A show was at the same gallery and the prices were pretty high and not a lot of the work sold. I have a feeling that there are probably more Dunny fans than 3A but whether people are willing to spend the cash is still something I cannot speculate on.

Thursday, May 3, 2012

Dunny in 3's

Neck deep in custom for the MW show next Friday and I still have so much work to do. The sculpting on the 20" is proving to be soooo lengthy and I'm definitely gonna had ego cut down on what I had planned for the show. So now I think I'm only going to be able to finish the 20" with his 8", 3" and mini inner companions, and one other 8" with his companions. If I'm really lucky I will be able to finish a 2nd solo 8"but I had planned on making some solo 3"ers but I don't have enough magnets left. Here some pics...and an alternate design for Manda...cause you don't want the same design on every single piece. That would be stupid.


Different eyes, hair, color palette and outfit. I think I'm gonna use this on the 20" and then she might end up on a 3" inside one of the solo 8" ers. And the drawing is incomplete...the art for her ears got lost in transition but it was sorta irrelevant since I was changing other parts. She's gonna have her arms behind he rack holding something...not sure what yet. Something nautical. Maybe a treasure map but how to portray that so it looks like a map??? A rolled up piece of old parchment...maybe she's holding the medallion from Goonies.



Unsanded 8" casts. I used a single piece mold and just some seams so getting them lined back up perfect is tough thus the zigzag seem lines.


Cutting off the pour nubs and sanding left me covered in white resin dust. I had a mask on so only a little ended up in my lungs forever.


Where I pour my resin...thankfully I have that mat or else the carpet would be a big white, hardened puddle of resin and silicon....cause I've spilled a ton of it. The first time I poured the 8" DUnny mold I didn't put enough rubber bands around the outside and resin started pouring out of every seem....alll over the floor.

8" inside of his 20" brothers legs.