Dressed to Kaiju

For my first Japanese vinyl production, I wanted to produce a finger puppet. Finger puppets are single part casts with no articulation. Therefore, the tooling that is much cheaper than fully articulated, multi part design.

Wanting to have a low cost first run, I started to play around with some finger puppet concepts. One focus was of a giant eye on its side. There were various designs of this concept but one really stuck out.

Finger puppet sketch by Shane Haddy

I really liked the aesthetics of this design but it wasn't working as a finger puppet. As I was focusing on finger puppet designs, it was set aside. I did feel it would be better as a head but didn't sketch a body I was happy with. Jump to a month later, I was working on another design where the face was 80% of the body and then it clicked! I have the perfect head for this form.

Inspired, I started to sketch up a few designs and ended up with this:

Concept body sketch by Shane Haddy

I posted it onto my twitter asking for feedback and I got some great tips, especially regarding form requirements for casting in Japan. Main points being the arms are too small and I should fan out the legs. I passed the concept onto TOVI with the feedback notes and she produced this:

Concept body sketch by TOVI

Not only did TOVI add her unique style, she came back with a cool name! Dactylus! Dactyly is the arrangement of digits (fingers and toes) on the hands and feet. On a side note, this is how TOVI and I work. I generally sketch up a design and pass it on to get cleaned up and TOVI'afied.

I am still finalising Dactylus and I'm totally open for any critiquing! So if you have any thoughts about the design, please post!

Going back onto the finger puppet design, I have got something in the works, just working out details with the sculptor. I will reveal soon!

Great eye of Dactylus is watching you!