My family is moving out of the condominium where my wife and I have lived for 17 years, and my kids have lived their entire lives. It involves a lot of tape, a lot of stuffing things into boxes, and a lot of people complaining when I've inadvertantly packed up something they still wanted access to, like medicine or food or the family cat. I could have decided "well, I'm moving, so I'm definitely not doing a project this month" but then I decided after taking the entire year of 2021 off, I do have some catching up to do, and I definitely don't need to get into the habit of making excuses every month. So, I packed up everything in the workshop except for my work bench and model paints, and I managed to build the Mage, the tricky tentacled trouble-maker with a taste for... uh, trouble? Terror? That's as good as it gets. My thesaurus is already packed away in a box somewhere. Now, however, I really do need to pack up the model paints and paintbrushes. I'm not sure what April 2022 is going to look like yet, but I'll certainly make a solid, half-assed effort to come up with something in about a month!
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This month, the kids are out of school again (thank you, COVID-19, for your systematic attempts at demolishing the public education system). So, I've spent a lot more time than normal yelling at children between the ages of eight and twelve—and then when that's done, I come inside and yell at my own kids as well. Also, my wife has been home recovering from surgery not once, but twice (what are the odds that carpal tunnel syndrome would strike in both her hands?). So I've been making her peanut butter toast and folding laundry and the various other things that I do in my role as her own personal emergency back-up hands. Not a lot of time left in the day to do very important , very silly things like painting toys.
About halfway through November I realized I still hadn't started any Final Fantasy IV projects. Finally, I said to myself, "Well, I'll just cheat and do the TinyToad—it will be super simple, super easy, and then I can pretend I actually did a real project this month!" And even that didn't happen. (I could teach classes on how to be lazy, but it seems like way too much work.) So, quite possibly no update for this month. Not unless I suddenly feel inspired right after Thanksgiving and decide what the world really needs is for me to crank out a TinyToad in a few days! It's the end of March and, thanks to COVID-19 taking control of the world as we know it, the local school has shut down and my kids cannot be trusted to stay home all day by themselves. So, I've been watching them and yelling at them and occasionally painting toys.
Since I had some extra time, I really went all out with these projects, rebuilding almost every aspect of the original action figures. I won't tell you what they are yet, but if you have any sort of familiarity with the monsters of Final Fantasy IV, you may already have a guess based on the above quote. If not, I guess you'll just have to wait a few more days. They'll be ready soon! So, not too long after I finished up a batch of four flying eyeball monsters from Final Fantasy IV, my daughter, who was about five years old at the time, decided to sneak them off my display shelf and play with them when I wasn't looking. I've explained to her that the toys that I've painted are only meant for looking at, not for touching, but that didn't stop her from trying to flap the wings, chipping paint off all over the place. She denies having done any of this, but I have several keen-eyed cats reporting to me, and they totally saw her do it. The truth is that I was never completely pleased with the wings, but of course I was limited by what existed on the market at the time. About two years later, I saw some How to Train Your Dragon toys in stores and kicked myself for not waiting and using those wings instead. Well, I generally don't make it a habit of redoing projects, but these toys needed to be repaired anyway. I figured as long as I was working on them, I would tear the old wings off and rebuild them. And, to be honest, they're immeasurably better for it. I also completely repainted the toys and they look so much better than they did the first time I worked on them. But, don't tell my daughter. So, without further ado, I'm very pleased to present the new-and-improved versions of the FatalEye, the FloatEye, the Plague, and the Red Eye. Since this was technically a redo, and not a new project unveiling, I'm going to try to squeeze in another project for March. Thanks to the coronavirus, the kids are out of school and I'm home with them for the next week [editor's note: more like four months!], so I imagine I'll have quite a bit of down time. I guess we'll see how it goes! |
DAVID GRAHAM EDWARDS
Illustrator, writer, painter, sculptor, collector of toys and cats, observer of things. Categories
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