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!
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So, longtime visitors to the site will notice that I took a long break, for the better part of a year. I'm going to steal a line from Douglas Adams and claim that I was spending a year dead for tax reasons. That's not at all accurate, but it's funnier than the truth, which is that I was depressed and didn't feel like working on anything. (I'm honestly surprised my model paints hadn't all dried up in the interim.) However, I'm trying to ease back into things, and despite the utter misery that was 2021, I'm still committed to finishing up the monsters of Final Fantasy IV. At this point, I'm roughly halfway there! My first projects for 2022 were a comparatively easy pair of creatures to bring to life, namely the Armadilo [sic] and the Ironback. It's nice to finally add something new to the display shelf! I've still been gobbling up tiny plastic animals and decades-old action figures and things on eBay, with the intent of turning them all into projects some day. So, with any luck you'll see something new here next month. However, if 2021 taught me anything, it's that you absolutely cannot predict the future. Guess we'll see in March! I'm done making excuses. There will be updates to this site come hell or high water. (And I mean that quite literally. In the past couple of weeks, I've dealt with a flooded basement as well as an upper respiratory illness that may have resulted from the mold infestation in said basement. However, whatever doesn't kill you just makes you weak and debilitated, as they say.) So there are a trio of flying, winged insects from Final Fantasy IV, namely the SandMoth (which anybody who has played the game for ten minutes has probably seen), the RockMoth, and the extremely reclusive GlomWing (who, besides having a wacky mistranslated name, is almost impossible to find if you don't know exactly where to look). I have painted all of these lovely Lepidoptera, and I invite you to let them into your home, eat your sweaters, and cover you in their multi-colored wing dust. Next month marks the conclusion of my second year of working on the monsters of Final Fantasy IV. Progress from this point on may grow increasingly more challenging, partly due to the fact that I'm saving some of the really difficult baddies for last (I'm looking at you, Zeromus), and partly because there are still a few beasties that I simply have no idea how I'm going to build. I seem to somehow have developed a following of hundreds of unique visitors a week. Stop it. Seriously, people. You're making me feel guilty that I didn't do a March update now. (I could offer excuses about how it was my birthday, and then I took some time off to paint my daughter's room, and then, uh, there was this zombie apocalypse. Two out of three of those things may actually be true.) So here's a tiny, insignificant offering by way of apology. I have a bookshelf for all my Final Fantasy IV projects now, and I envision it as being less a display shelf and more a diorama. I'm trying to populate it with props like trees and rocks and things that make sense for the environment in which these monsters tend to appear in the actual game. I might even try to print backgrounds from the actual game and use that as a backdrop. I'm not sure. I haven't gotten that far yet. Anyway, my point is that I've also been collecting treasure chests and things, because obviously those factor into the game mechanics. Cecil and his buddies find these damn things all over the place. They're in castles. They're in forests. They're in the desert. They're on the Moon, for crying out loud. Figure that one out. This particular one is from the Animal Jam series of blind-packed figurines by Jazwares. I had been planning to buy up a whole bunch of these when they went on clearance, but I mostly missed out. I've got one, at least. I guess it makes sense that there would be a lot of different-looking treasure chests if Cecil is finding them all over the world. (Selective rationalization is how I sleep at night. That and Advil PM.) Also, directly below is a sneak preview of what I'm working on right now. These guys are from the Skeleton Warriors toy line that Playmates Toys sold in the 1990's. The character's name is Aracula, and he used to have six arms. You would not believe how much people were charging for these things on eBay during Halloween. Like, I don't want to break the bank on used action figures from 20 years ago, especially when I'm just going to hack them apart with an X-Acto knife. Hey, I did it! Managed to squeeze in another batch of projects for the month of January. I'm officially all caught up. This was a fairly simple set of projects, which is always a nice respite from the intensive toy reconstruction that I often find myself involved in. Where some of the more fanciful Final Fantasy IV monster designs require me to cobble together existing toys in weird ways, these guys were off-the-shelf repaints. And they're so cute. There are three types of bats appearing in the game, namely the Cave Bat, the GiantBat, and the Were Bat. Not sure what next month's project(s) will be yet. I try not to stifle my creativity too much by locking myself into specific ideas. So, I guess I'll be as surprised as the rest of you! There are lots of monsters from Final Fantasy IV that are just regular animals with a nasty attitude. Alligators, birds, turtles, etc. Then there are these gigantic flying eyeballs with bat wings. That's a bit more unusual. I built one of these several years ago (the FloatEye), back when I figured I'd just make one Final Fantasy monster and call it good. Then, I got this crazy idea in my head to build all of them (no, I'm not sure what's wrong with me), so I ended up redoing that one in addition to the three other baddies who share the same sprite design. Two of them, the FloatEye and Red Eye, are doin' hard time on planet Earth, while the remaining two, the dangerous FatalEye and the deadly Plague, live on the Moon. Check 'em out! Also, I started building monsters from Final Fantasy IV in May 2017, so this month marks the one-year anniversary of this grand and glorious endeavor. Usually I'll bounce around randomly from Star Wars to Transformers to Ninja Turtles projects, but this is the first time in my career as a hobbyist that I've devoted an entire year to a single franchise. In the last 12 months I've finished up 37 creatures from Final Fantasy IV. There are roughly 200 monsters and bosses from the game, so at the rate I'm going, I can expect to get them all done within five years. (Check this space in 2023 to see how far I've gotten!) |
DAVID GRAHAM EDWARDS
Illustrator, writer, painter, sculptor, collector of toys and cats, observer of things. Categories
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