Saturday 29 September 2012

Tuesday 25 September 2012

Clutter Magazine... ME! and how silicone works.

Okay, first off, I will be exhibiting and selling something at the Clutter Magazine show in NYC in January. I will be returning to my adult themed roots I expect as I have an idea that would time perfectly with this.

http://www.cluttermagazine.com/

This is bloody exciting. At the very least, something about what I do has been deemed worthy of shipping over to America, where films and kids that go "Here we go again! Woahhhh!" come from.

I got some silicone through today and all I have to do is finish the test mold i'm making now. I mailed the maker and it's ok for pressurising. Nice.

I found out what was up with my last batch, the seller Polysil ( A GREAT COMPANY!) got back to me about why their stuff is not suitable for pressurising. Turns out that unlike the stuff you normally get accross the Atlantic, over here our catalysts are tin/condensation based. This apparently means that the need moisture to cure properly. The lovely 1:1 stuff that people use over the pond is apparently platinum based which makes it ok for curing under pressure.
They told me all this and still refunded me, even though they did nothing wrong - so the world isn't full of arseholes.

The stuff  I've got in the pot now is apparently  tin based too, but totally ok for pressure curing. So all the information i've been given is now a little confusing. I should just google it and stop being a shnork.


Saturday 22 September 2012

See ya next week!

Too annoyed at the crap silicone I got through wasting most  of the time I spent making toys this week. Got almost nothing worth doing done today and had planned to get Treegarr done this weekend. I won't give up. I'll get some from silicone from  my trusted supplier and try again, and then again if I need to. But for now I have to throw my hands up and chill out.

Thursday 20 September 2012

Bad silicone - again?!

It's probably my fault this time but this stuff is curing wayyyy to slow! I can't run my compressor at night so 8 hours curing max is my ideal limit. but I like to work fast and be able to re-make the molds quickly like I did with the Critter project. 1:10 curing agent ratio my balls! I did a little tester with 20% and it seems fine and cured in an hour like the product sheet said! There's 300g of expensive shit down the drain.

Ah well, when art and hard work marry, there is only Einsturzende Neubauten to keep the heart ticking:

Wednesday 12 September 2012

Damage control on Treegarr.

Here's a bit of a sneak peak at one of Treegarr's hands. When I baked this, I totally forgot how powerful our oven was. It's really tough to strike a balance between hot enough and too hot (120 degrees, I think?). I left it in a minute too long and the arm I built the sculpt on was molten. I sawed off the useless upper and am attaching a new upper section, with the all important socket I need to be unwarped.

Monday 10 September 2012

YOUR CRITTERS ARE ON THE WAY

Just 5 left in my shop. They are all in bags and boxes winging their way around the world. My hallway looks so clear!

Sunday 9 September 2012

Discipline.

This past two weeks has been seriously mental. Next time we do a collab minifig drop, I really need to learn how to organise using spreadsheets etc.

We've made and shipped over 200 Critters in two weeks - working in the evenings, between getting home from work and bedtime.. They were very reasonably priced, well produced, and awesomely sculpted. We all worked our arses off and it felt great to know that what we did was worth doing. We didn't half-arse and waste time. No-one at any point pussied out and slacked off. We all kept in touch because we really wanted to do it. We wanted to see hundreds of different variants of this toy flying to excited collectors, like ourselves, around the world. A childhood dream come true.

It's too easy to get to a gym and be so happy you've made it there that you don't put the effort in to the actual work. It's true of so many things in life.
I used to pro-wrestle. I also did a little competitive bodybuilding when I was a teenager. I learned a lot about the value of accepting rules. Not being a sheep or being controlled - ACCEPTING rules.

When I first got interested in toymaking, I did that thing of getting rock solid advice and thinking "that's too hard, or expensive, or takes too much time - I'll find an easier way". The secret to everything worth doing is THERE IS NO EASIER WAY.  It took me a lot of mails from Gold Dober before I accepted  that if I do something half arsed, it will look like exactly that.
I hate Munnies. It'd be easy for me to slate peoples work in that format as it's not my kind of thing. The fact is, when people sell custom Munnies, it's because they accepted the workload that they knew it'd take, to get their vision realised.

I am not hot shit at all. This is just my thing i'm doing to make myself happy. Of all the things I do in my daily life, this is the thing that I love to build on. It's the art form  I've always loved. I love reading about toymakers like Birnkrant, The Horsemen, Godbeast, Doughty, and learning all the different elements of the craft from people I write to like GoldDober and Ben Spencer.  There's a lot that sucks about internet culture - but it's been great for getting to talk to people who I otherwise would never meet. I must say, the ratio of people who have a hard-on for themselves is refreshingly low. It's restored my faith in people quite a lot.

(Pictured right is the Diazombie being sent off by the last remaining legacy of the ACro-Zombie project. A bunch of imperfect parts that'll stay here with my Micronauts collection. Below are the last three one-off MicroKeshi I made. But certainly not the last ever!)
Got a sackload of toys to ship off tomorrow. One particular box had a bunch of different keshi, my last Acro-zombie, and some other bits in and it's the proudest i've felt of my toymaking since I started. I looked in that box and saw a load of awesome stuff i'd made. Some I sculpted. Some I simply cast. But it was a box of stuff I myself would have been thrilled to open if i'd bought it from someone else. We fucking rocked this Critter project and i'm glad amongst all the fellow nerds of various social ability i've met online, i'm working with people that have a real spirit of fun, but also have high standards in what they do and have the discipline to be thorough with every element of toymaking/producing etc.

My past two projects have been a free education in the art I love. Now I get to do some sculpting again.
Treegarrs arms are a bitch. But everytime I'm not happy with them, I'm cutting down and rebuilding.

Wednesday 5 September 2012

Barely a Critter left...

Sorry i've been quiet - super busy with shipping. 
Everyone who's 100% paid up got theirs shipped off  today at the latest. got a couple more to finish up matters with. This'll all be done by friday night.
Again, all three of us in this collab have had a great time and worked our knackers off on these, but are so happy this fig has resonated so well. I myself am still working out how to use this neon pigment i've go without it going all pale. Seems to work if I don't pressurize it but that's no good. Definitely still lots of cool variants left to experiment with.
 I think we've broken the 200 mark! And I haven't even made any MIMP colors yet!

Sunday 2 September 2012

Saturday 1 September 2012

CHURNING OUT CRITTERS LIKE AN 80s MONTAGE...

Here's a few of them - Real pretty, even I do say so myself. Plenty of ideas/combos to get throuh before the day is done!