I told you these would be ready soon. I just needed a couple of extra days, is all. Anyway, two of the creatures you will undoubtedly encounter in Final Fantasy IV are a couple of fish men, who appear at different times. They share the same game sprite design, but one is a greenish water-dwelling monster called the WaterHag and the other is a salmon-colored desert creature known as the Sand Man. They're roughly based on a monster from Dungeons & Dragons called the Sahuagin, which is why it may seem vaguely familiar. Well, you guys know me by now. I would certainly have heavily modified the original toys if it had been warranted, all in the name of matching the original 16-bit Super Nintendo game sprite as closely as possible. We have the technology. However, in this case, there was almost no modification necessary. As it happens, the Phibious character from the Matt Hatter Chronicles (a UK-based franchise) was already so perfect that I hardly had to make any changes to him at all. Utter serendipity!
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This month I decided to tackle a rather challenging trio of Final Fantasy IV monsters. In addition to the many animals and fantasy creatures in the game, there are also a few ethereal, ectoplasmic entities whose game sprites suggest a certain wispy and insubstantive quality. How to represent that in three dimensions, one wonders? Well, I happened upon the existence of a great-looking vintage Dungeons & Dragons figurine, which is rather ironic considering how many creatures from the early Final Fantasy games were, indeed, based on monsters from D&D. Anyway, I spent a lot of time working on these guys, not just during the building and painting stages but also in sculpting some special figure stands to help support them for display. Without further ado, I present the Ghost, the Soul, and the Spirit, the last of which officially marks my 1ooth Final Fantasy IV project (if you tally them up somewhat selectively)! You have no idea how hard I tried to make sure these guys made it into the June update. (Why does it matter? In the grand scheme of things, it probably doesn't. But, creating arbitrary goals and then panicking about them gives me some sense of accomplishment when I actually meet my own artificially manufactured deadlines!) The Gargoyle and Hooligan are two flying baddies you meet at various points during Final Fantasy IV, and they're yet another type of monster shamelessly borrowed by SquareSoft from the old Dungeons & Dragons tabletop role-playing game. They're not particularly notable enemies in the game, but they exist, so I made a couple. The law of averages dictates that half my projects are going to turn out above-average and half will be below-average. That's just how things work. There's no way around it. While I feel like they ultimately ended up looking pretty good, I definitely had an above-average number of problems while working on them. The action figure I picked to represent these two monsters needed to be complete with his wings, which requried several months' worth of prodigious eBaying to acquire. So, naturally, I melted the wings in the oven! What a tragedy! (I did find some replacement wings that worked even better, thankfully. Crisis averted!) Hey, look at me! I was able to squeeze in one more update for this month! (See, I'm not a complete slacker. Probably only about three-quarters of a slacker.) So my latest pair of monsters from Final Fantasy IV owe their origins to Greek mythology, thus demonstrating that the game designers weren't relying entirely on Dungeons & Dragons for inspiration (just mostly)! The Chimera and Mantcore [sic] were both particularly nasty beasts, due in no small part to the fact that you can't use traditional magical attacks to dispatch them. I look at these two three-dimensional creations and I just get angry—not because I feel like they turned out poorly by any stretch of the imagination, but because they remind me so much of the video game monsters that were such an endless source of frustration for me. I've gotten some feedback from visitors who want to see me focus on uploading some of my older custom toys (I've been modifying toys and putting pictures online since 1998 or so, so as you can imagine, there's quite a backlog). I promise to make an effort to squeeze that in amongst all my many other projects! |
DAVID GRAHAM EDWARDS
Illustrator, writer, painter, sculptor, collector of toys and cats, observer of things. Categories
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