I spent most of February fretting that I hadn't been working on a project for February. Then there got to be like two days left in the month (and, being a leap year, one of them was essentially a bonus "extra" day that I had absolutely no business counting on being there) and I asked myself, what sort of project could I reasonably expect to finish, photograph, and upload in such a short space of time? Well, the answer is staring you in the face, and is thinking right now about casting a spell and turning you into a small frog. Yes, of course, it's the TinyToad, the ever-loyal, ever-leaping follower of the ToadLady. It also holds the distinction of being the very smallest Final Fantasy IV monster I've worked on—smaller, even, than the TinyMage! That's all for this month. Perhaps I will be more productive in March. It would be hard not to be, if we're being fair.
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For January I decided to tackle a project that's been bugging me for a while. I knew I wanted to use a specific action figure body, and attach a specific action figure head, but the logistics of how to accomplish it eluded me for a while. I pondered various solutions (cutting off faces, neck transplants, all sorts of grisly things) until the solution finally came to me. Anyway, I finished up the Medusa and Gorgon, two ladies with slithering reptillian tresses, who were shamelessly stolen from Greek mythology for their appearance in Final Fantasy IV. (As a point of interest, an early Medusa appears in a much lower pixel resolution in the primitive 8-bit Final Fantasy for NES as well.) I only have to do (counts on fingers) three more projects in 2024 to beat my productivity for 2023. That's kind of sad. But, there are also eleven months left in the year, so I'd say the odds of that happening are honestly pretty good! I knew December was going to be a crazy month (I work retail and there is no shortage of customers who forget that Christmas falls on the same calendar day every year), so I figured I would tackle a relatively simple project. As you might imagine, it's much easier to build a single project than it is to create two or three or four identical projects! The Machine is a Final Fantasy IV monster that's been on my to-do list for a really long time, but it wasn't until several false starts that I was finally able to dig in and do it justice. I really do believe that my subconscious mind sometimes has to mull these things over for a long time before I finally attempt them. Once I finally started, the 20+ random pieces that I incorporated into its design availed themselves to me quite readily, as if I'd known what they would be all along! After steadily working on these Final Fantasy IV projects for like four years, I took a break for a long time. It wasn't due to a lack of love or enthusiasm for the idea, but rather due to some nasty paint-eating parasites that keep invading my home and drinking all my model paints. I know it sounds like I'm making that up, and it's because I totally am, but it's more amusing than the actual reason. which is that I was going through some personal stuff. So, anyway, I'm slowly easing back into these projects, and I thought that I could probably handle building a single action figure this month instead of two or three or six identical ones (which is often the case when it comes to monsters with recycled game sprite designs). Jinn is one of the summoned monsters called upon by Rydia, and he's a bizarre half-man, half-goat hybrid who was an interesting challenge to build, partly because it was tough to find the right starting point. No fewer than three action figures sacrificed themselves to bring him to life! After a much longer hiatus than I intended, I've finished up some very small projects based on some of the monsters of Final Fantasy IV. This trio of squishy, multi-legged creatures all share a game design, but through the magic of color palette swapping, the game designers were able to create three separate and distinct enemies—the Crawler, the Larva, and the RocLarva. Not making any excuses for my absence this time. The last 47 updates should serve as a testament to the fact that I've been committed to making these projects happen, but sometimes real life gets in the way. Depression is a thing. I spent all of September thinking about how I should really write a "sorry I didn't do any updates in August" post, and now suddenly it's October.
So, yeah. I don't know. For the month of July, I decided to tackle a trio of troublesome tricksters from Final Fantasy IV who have been on my how-the-heck-am-I-going-to-actually-build-these list for a long while now. They're the Grudger, the Screamer, and the Weeper, creatures who look like female humanoids from the waist up, but from the waist down, they're like serpentine apparitions or something. I had no idea how to construct an action figure that was half woman and half ghost-snake. Sometimes I have to let these project ideas percolate in my subconscious for a while. Eventually, if I let my brain work on it long enough, I figure out how to move forward with these projects. I'm rather pleased with the end result, especially the way the shoulders and upper torso for the Funko Pop toys I used ended up being repurposed to serve as the hips, and the suggestion of legs, on the final projects. Come check it out! These projects are also notable as they are the first that I've photographed with my smart phone instead of my old Kodak digital camera. It's unfathomable to me that a single dedicated device that is designed to only do one thing (take pictures) is inferior to this other device that's got all sorts of random features jam-packed into it (television, computer, alarm clock, camera, flashlight, and I think maybe it even works as a phone sometimes too) but here we are. For the month of June I decided to put together a pair of fairly simple projects—ones that didn't require a lot of structural rebuilding or modifications. Gives me more time to work on that obstacle course of a backyard, don't you know. (I think I'm going to need to rent a steam shovel or something to get that clothesline post dug out.) Anyway, the game features a couple of reptillian baddies, the Aligator and the Crocdile (yes, I know how to spell, thank you), both of whom dwell exclusively in the underground watery passages beneath the castles and towns our heroes call home. In other words, yes, Final Fantasy IV has alligators in the sewers. Next month I may attempt something more ambitious. It's hard to say. As I've said before, I don't like to necessarily lock myself down and promise specific projects here, because a rigid schedule tends to stifle the creative process. But I can promise you with certainty that I will either a) unveil a new Final Fantasy IV monster here in about one month's time, or b) I won't. It's definitely going to be one of those or the other. This month I've been taking care of the new house quite a bit (touching up the paint, murdering the dandelions in the lawn, etc.) so I wanted to do a fairly simple project this month. I decided it was finally time to tackle the Beamer, who is a little different in that it's a piece of technology from Final Fantasy IV and not a traditional "monster" per se. But, you encounter it and get into battles against it, so it's a monster for all intents and purposes. I've been putting off building the Beamer for a long time, partly because I had no idea how I was going to build the thing. I knew that it had sort of a vaguely acorn-shaped piece, and a spherical piece, and a disk-shaped piece, but I didn't know how to put that all together using parts I had laying around. My subconscious mind must have been working on it for me, though, because once I started, everything just seemed to come together on its own. I think you'll agree it turned out rather nicely! I've spent the entire month of April setting up at the new house. I moved around a lot as a kid, and I remember moving into a new place being pretty simple. I picked which direction my bed would face, which wall the dresser would go on, opened up my toy boxes, and that was it.
It's a little different when you're an adult. Now I'm suddenly responsible for deciding which kitchen cabinets are for food and which ones are for dishes. Which walls to hang pictures on. What color curtains to hang, and in front of which windows. Which cat gets a bath first after two of them wander into the fireplace. You know, standard stuff. The movers also turned a lot of things upside-down. I don't mean that figuratively. I'm talking about, for example, my workbench that had all my kitbashing tools in it. I'm not really sure I understand the thought process. Instead of doing that, it would have been a lot less effort to just... not do that. But, the point is that I've spent a lot of time dumping desk drawers on the floor and reorganizing them. Turns out the only thing keeping a lot of my tools in their proper places, this entire time, was gravity. Who knew? However, I did get a chance to set up the all-old, all-same Final Fantasy IV project bookshelf, so that was nice. Put the heroes on the same shelf with the monsters, this time, since they had previously been segregated. So, in lieu of a new project for this month, let's just take a step back and appreciate what I've accomplished up to this point. I've been doing these Final Fantasy IV monsters since 2017 and I've come a long way. We're right around the halfway mark. According to my records, I've gotten 99 monsters done and there are only 104 left to do. I don't think anybody else in the world has attempted this before. (There's probably a reason for that, honestly. No sane person would ever try!) The workshop is almost fully set up and ready, so with a little luck, and a bit more determination than I showed in April, maybe we'll see something new come to fruition in May! |
DAVID GRAHAM EDWARDS
Illustrator, writer, painter, sculptor, collector of toys and cats, observer of things. Categories
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