Believe it or not, I didn't intend to take a two-month hiatus. It's January, but I was actually working on this month's batch of projects while listening to Bobby Pickett's "Monster Mash." (Because it was Halloween, you see. Which is at the end of October, just so we're crystal clear.) Part of the problem was a work injury which made it difficult for me to get up and down the stairs to visit my workshop. Part of it, too, was that I spent the entire month of November talking to an AI chatbot. (Hey, what can I say. Artificial intelligence fascinates me. Also, she's really cute.) I think that by far the biggest problem, though, is that I had enormous difficulty sculpting the new heads for these projects. It was a challenge for me to take the two-dimensional 16-bit game sprite (which is fairly abstract) and translate it into three-dimensional space. We only see his head from a side view, too, so figuring out what he might look like from the front was an interesting exercise in visual extrapolation. I think I arrived at a pretty decent end result, though. Without further ado, I present the Stoneman, the Staleman [sic], and the Ironman (insert Avengers joke here). So, sorry about the last couple of months. I intended to unveil a new batch of projects every month, but there was nothing for November or December. I did unveil two projects in October, though, so that's something. Maybe if I manage to squeeze in one more project by the end of January, we'll be all caught up!
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I knew that December was going to be a pretty busy month for me (I work in retail, and there seems to be no shortage of people who seem to forget that Christmas falls on the 25th of the month every year) so I thought this would be a good time to do a somewhat simpler project. The CPU was a surprisingly high-tech boss you encounter in Final Fantasy IV after traversing the bowels of the Giant of Bab-il. It requires a certain amount of strategy to defeat, since a brute force kill-it-till-it-dies approach doesn't work. It feels safe as long as the Attacker and Defender spheres that guard the computer processing unit are still functional, but get rid of them and the CPU goes into panic mode, unleashing an attack that spells insta-death for Cecil and his party members. Hope you saved your game somewhere before you found this out! Finding just the right ball-shaped objects to create physical representations of the CPU and Attacker and Defender was just the first step. I also had to figure out how to paint those tiny little dots on the surface of the CPU. Come on, you know you want to know how I did it now. Merry Christmas! I find that I have been steadily collecting toys and collectibles to transform into the 200+ monsters of Final Fantasy IV at a much greater rate that I've actually been building them. Spending money is easy; hacking away at toys with an X-Acto knife and gluing random parts to their bodies and mixing up batch after batch of paint, well, takes a bit more time. Factor in the fact that it's the holiday season (hoop-de-doo and dickory dock) and I manage a toy department, and you can perhaps understand that I've been slightly exhausted. Anyway, I now have an entire box filled with toys that are eventually going to be added to the illustrious roster of Final Fantasy IV monsters. It's not all of them, by any stretch of the imagination, but it's a decent start. I have a master list of all the baddies in the game along with some ideas of which toys might be suitable to represent them. (For example: I've always thought that Morrigan from Capcom's Dark Stalkers would be perfect to represent the VampGirl and VampLady. The Brooklyn toy from Disney's Gargoyles will be suitable for the Hooligan that appears in the game. When it comes to monsters like the WaterBug or the StoneMan or the AquaWorm or the DarkTree? I have absolutely no idea! Seriously, I would appreciate some suggestions.) For now, here's my latest batch of creatures: the Eagle, the Roc Baby, and the regrettably-named Cocktric, all appearing in different stages of the game. These are pretty different than a lot of the projects I've done in the past. I tend to favor cartoony media characters over realistic-looking animals, but I feel like they turned out really well. Is it a bad thing when I'm actually impressed by my own work...? |
DAVID GRAHAM EDWARDS
Illustrator, writer, painter, sculptor, collector of toys and cats, observer of things. Categories
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