Order up!!

Continuing my Lady Maxx Diner line of customs, I have made an Eyezon cheese burger for the 'Kaiju for Japan'. Kaiju for Japan is an online sale event to raise funds for Japan's earthquake and tsunami victims.

Sorry, I haven't taken many WIP pictures but here we go.



After some hesitation, I cut up the poor defenceless mini eyezon. This was a sad moment as I purchased him at the 2010 winter Wonderfest in Japan, where they first debuted. Other than being part of the first release, Wonderfest restored my faith and passion in toy design. This blank had lots of meaning to me, using him would be most fitting for the cause.



Sand, sand, sand!!! This is where most of my time was spent. Carving the cracks, smoothing out, carving deeper, smoothing out more.... all by hand, I really need a Dremel. After everything was ready, it was time to paint with Monster Kolor. I have said it before, but I am always really impressed with MK paints! Its hard to see in the photos but there are many subtle changes in the paint work. I will make a video once its a nice day to capture the colours in the sunlight.

Monster Kolor Paints

Buns (top and bottom)
Over Easy, Fleshless, FireCracker and C-Thru Orange

Cheese
Yellow and Over Easy

Patty
Brown (non MK) and Colour Change Flakes

All
Thick and juicy layer of clear coat!!!

side by side

Hit up GorillaMouth.bigcartel.com on April 22nd for Eyezon Burger and many other cool customs and originals done by many talented artists and designers. Seeing some of the submissions and knowing the names involved, I highly advise getting your wallets ready to buy some wild pieces for a great cause!

For more information on the event and Troy Stith, the great man behind putting kaiju for japan together, please visit his blog http://www.gorillamouth.com/

Pray for Japan

Stronger, faster

Broken Barrelmon - A sad day

Barrelmon in all of his pieces. Lucky enough, he broke into parts that will help with casting. I have been cleaning him up in preperation for a new cast and have recently noticed a few areas that need repair. He is doing fine and will bounce back with a healthy recovery.

We can rebuild him!

I said HEY

WOW, time does fly by! Sorry for the delay of blog posts, I plan to rectify this right now.

I have individually spoken to people about various events of the past two months and mentioned things on my twitter but I thought it would be best to post about what’s going on. Especially for people waiting for Barrelmon!

The adventure of Barrelmon:

When I got Barrelmon, the best way to recast it would have been to split him into parts and cast each individually. It would have been the best way but TOVI and I didn’t want to cut up her sculpt, she put many hours into it and I didn’t want part lines in the final product, especially on the eye sockets. Wanting to cast it as one piece, I knew with my skill level in moulding and casting, it would be best to hire an expert. So I started my first quest; to find a local caster that was happy to cast in one piece, this was hard, many telling me it wasn’t possible and giving me outrageous quotes to steer me away.

Then, I found someone that knew exactly what I wanted and everything was perfect! I booked him for the start of March. Then he got delayed on a few projects and I told him that was fine, but then it got delayed into his holiday and my booking got pushed back till after. Wanting March to be the release date, I said I will attempt it myself. He gave me some tips and I ordered my supplies.

Moulding and casting is tricky, I have done it for one off simple prototypes before but producing a quality run is entirely different. Barrelmon is quite a complicated sculpt with many undercuts and thin twisting sections that can create issues, the biggest being pockets of air that can’t escape that prevents resin to fill the entire mould. Knowing this, I planned out a mould, which replicated quite well.

Sadly, Barrelmon himself didn’t make it out of the mould alive! Poor little guy broke all over when I took him out! This was okay I thought to myself: “I have a mould now...... I can cast many!” Yet, there were more air pockets than I first anticipated, which produced poor resin casts.

I have been editing the mould by cutting out channels for the air to escape but with little success, I am pouring casts that may have less air pockets but more issues seem to arise by my edited moulds. It’s a battle!

So, with Barrelmon in pieces, I have been trying to recover the mould. I am still trying to rescue the mould but I am going to now cast the individual parts he broke into. It will be easier making the mould but it will require much more hands on work putting together and cleaning up once cast.

For me, it has been a great learning experience with developing projects. So many discoveries with unexpected problems. I love attempting all directions to solve problems and I think I have been too caught up in dealing with them and not informing people of what is going on.

Thanks for everyone who have shown support and patience with this production - I really hope to get Barrelmon out there as soon as possible, but quality comes first!

Video: Kaiju Barrelmon - Prototype

A full view of barrelmon

Video: Lady Maxx Cafe - Alien Argus

Hello all, sorry for the lack of updates! I will post a full post about the making of my Alien Argus custom soon. For now, enjoy this video :)

Bits of Beast - Eyes

Teaser #01 - Eye - sketch by TOVI

This is a teaser for the upcoming finger puppet toy. Rather than just showing teaser snippets, I would like talk about my thoughts on Kaiju design and my reasoning behind each teaser.

This bits of beast is about the kaiju eye. What do you need in the eye of the kaiju? Is it a tigers eye? Something comical? Fearful? Or a reptilian, like Godzilla.

In my case, I tend to just draw with no plan. Yet, when I look back, there is always something that has inspired me. Looking back on design of the finger puppet eyes, I can tell they are based off of the creepiest eyes in nature; horses eyes! They are glassy, soulless, black voids that pull you in, and not in a dreamy way!

Do horses eyes creep you out? They creep me out! I never really knew why till a few years ago when my mother was telling me a story of my youth.

We used to live next to a horses stable. The story that my mother told me was about how I used my pacifier longer than children should. My mother tried everything to stop me from using it. While I was whining for my pacifier one day, my mother gave up being nice and threw it over the fence saying "The horses have it now"!!! Hahhaha I can't remember this incident but I can only assume its the catalyst of my fear?

So there you go, I designed the eyes based off of my fear of horses eyes. Thanks mum, they make neat Kaiju eyes :P

It's time to ask for my pacifier back!

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!