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!
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Here are this month's additions to my ever-growing roster of toys based on Final Fantasy IV monsters. The EpeeGirl is arguably one of the game's most innocuously-named baddies, sure to raise the hackles of any self-respecting feminist, but one supposes "EpeeWoman" wouldn't have worked, given the hard limit on alphanumeric characters in the game. The other is her sister-in-arms, Kary, a more powerful foe living only on the Moon. Both custom toys can even achieve the distinctive kneeling pose used in their game sprites! I had thought about doing something really special to commemorate my 600th project. The special project is still in the works, but I'm anticipating the imminent release of a toy that will really help it along (there's a Venom movie coming out soon, right?) so I will probably put it on the back burner for a few months. Better to wait and do it justice than to try to force it into completion. Check this space in approximately one month's time for more! If I can manage to crank out projects even when we're having inventory at work, I can definitely come up with something during a slow month! 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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