clay time!

After spending a couple of days on character sketch work sheets and noting down rough shapes and methods of creating them, I decided today would be the day I bust out the ole air hardening clay.

This is the third stage of my character design for the typical chavy/ patriotic londoner(fourth if you consider drawings). The first was the awful woodcut I cobbled together last week, the second was a rough design of two polystyrene balls stuck together to give a basic and easily reproduced shape.


And today, the latest frankenstein like monster is unveiled to the world.

Presenting Bulldog 1 stage 4 :

Made from clay, kebab skewers, a knife ,sewing needles and ten ton of water. Need to give it a good cleaning up and paint when its dry before varnishing the beast. This has totally turned me off of going with clay for each toy.

I was planning on using it to give each model its own personal touches and molds, but the process is both time consuming and not as easy as I first thought. The material itself isnt clean enough for the professional look I want the figures to have - smooth, curved surfaces. I'll still see how the painted model looks but at this point injection moulding seems to be the way to go!

Tomorrow I'll be painting the good old London public as well as handing out some questionnaires to the public, friends and randomers in order to do some character building before I finalize the designs. Oh and maybe some snooping on competing toys to see what kind of packaging and graphics they utilize.

The bulldogs say goodbye, expect a decent update tomorrow!

Sunburn, doodles and Gallery Visits

Just a quick update today!
Decided to combine both weather and work today, and popped into central london to do a couple of gallery visits and draw the random folk.

Nothing of real interest with regards to the sketching. Just the standard " Multi- Cultural London folk" as Boris would be proud to say.

Gallery visits were The National Portrait Gallery to see 'Gerhard Richter.Portraits' and the Opus gallery was more of an accident, but some cool looking sculptures caught my eye.

Gerhard Richters work is INSANE! I accompanied a fellow student there familiar with the name but not the work. Seriously guys and gals GO TO IT!. Its traditionally painted work in oils on canvas, but they are painted from/ like blurred photographs. Some of the transparent overlay effects created in colour have to be seen! Not really important with regards to my project, but inspiring none the less.

The Opus gallery was one of those small ones off covent garden, but these two fellows in the window caught my eyeThe artist was not named so I'll probably go back and get a gallery guide, however there were two other artists whose work was interesting and relevant to mine.

The gallery's website says this about Hush : " ush is an urban artist who worked in Hong Kong for a number of years as a graphic designer/Illustrator before recently returning to the UK......Hush draws his influence from a wide variety of modern culture to create his work. His main interests being graphic-novels, animation, graphic-design, graffiti art, urban art and contemporary painting.

He has worked as a graphic designer & illustrator / art director in London, Edinburgh, Newcastle and Hong Kong where he worked for a few of the largest Toy companies in the world."

( http://www.opus-art.com/artists/Hush/2759 the opus gallery website)

Work by Hush

His take whilst very influenced by eastern culture, takes a number of design aspects from western work - something i can aspire to.

Remi Rough had a statue at the gallery of Solid Snake, the main character from the metal gear series. This was not sculpted by the artist however it was painted black and then tagged with graffiti and paint marks. This is similar to my idea of taking a pre sculpted work and adding my own flavour and design elements to it. Remi is a graffiti artist who was a leading member of the ikonoclast revolution in the 90's. Something to look into methinks. Since his beginnings he has spread out into art direction, music etc.

All in all, a pretty damn productive day!

Hell!

Apologies for the lack of a post yesterday! Back to business as usual from here on in. After my tutorial I decided to attempt to craft something/anything useful out of a block of wood. Now as most people know, I HATE 3-d and trying to wrangle with the problems that arise when doing it. I'm just not really a maker of physical objects.

Anyway, with my moan out of the way and a wee bit of inspiration from the South London Gallery ( see picture below), I decided to invest in cut offs from B&Q some hand tools and just go to work on wood seeing what I end up with and respond to.

Now you probably wont believe this took the better part of two and a bit hours, but I assure you it did! Im certainly not proud of this, but its a start and has thrown me totally out of this "comfort zone" everyone speaks about.

Air hardening clay still appeals to me, as I can control every aspect down to the most minute detail, and it doesnt crack like standard clay. For now though im going to use the Bandsaw to create some more interesting shapes on tuesday.

Plans for a new build. Model at S.L Gallery

English 'lout' Bulldog Version 1

quick update!

Gary Baseman is an artist based in San Fran whose vinyl toys and art youve probably seen all over the place but didnt know it. This guy is AWESOME! He is influenced ( both illustration and toys) by pop art. Mexicano and his american toys, advertising figures and sculptures from the 1920's, 1930's and 1940's - The big bold eyes are VERY Betty Boop-ish. The figures are very american, and his range of figures named 'Dunces' most certainly rifs off of this . Some of his illustrations are painted on top of typically american advertisments.



The dunce range

A little closer to figuring out how to make my figures quintessentially LDN/British

Today was pretty productive; sorted out a stronger direction for the project and the next few steps at the very least. Woodword, vacuum forming and injection moulding. NOT exactly my strongest points but a guys gotta try!

Still looking for a cool way to inject a sense of London/Britain into my vinyl toys. Ive been toying with the idea of the english bulldog as a base for all of my toys. Nathan Jurevicius managed to take a traditional japanese toy and inject some aussie heritage into it ( the mushroooooms!):

He has a highly graphic style - something that will come in handy when designing the box and graphics for the "promotion" of the toys.

I've been drawing people every day on my way to college to get character/human traits and looks down as accurately as possible. Funnily enough my "sleeping city fatcat" from day 2 was on my train again today
English bulldog says a slobbery hello! May update later if i make any progress on my first head sculpt.

SHAMELESS PLUG TIME !

Ten Ton studios are a group of illustrators who work primarily in comic books, pencilling, inking and colouring for both independant and major press.

The forums (www.tentonstudios.com/forum) is full of talented illustrators constantly posting and critiquing work. Marvel Comics regulars khoi pham and reilly brown take part in the sketch offs and critiquing work so its a definate place to hit if youre interested in the comic industry.

Ive got an ongoing sketchbook on there (http://www.tentonstudios.com/forum/index.php?topic=6591.0) so feel free to take a look and even join in on the fun!

Ingredients to make what?

This book is just awesome! Has a couple of in depth essays looking at the rhyme and reason for these high end 'art toys' and packed full of images and illustrations used in the development of the vinyl toy. Only negative is that its pretty geared towards the japanese market, we'll let em off as it kind of originated from there.

But what do these all make?