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!
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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. After spending a great deal of time working on my EvilMask project, I wanted to work on a Final Fantasy IV project that was a little bit simpler. I recently picked up some tiny fairy toys with the intent of turning some of them into the Sylphs, the little green fairy creatures whom Rydia eventually learns to summon during combat. Painting them was easy; the hard part was figuring out how to build a figure stand for them so they could be displayed as if they were in mid-flight. (And if you think they look a little bit like Tinkerbell from Disney's animated Peter Pan, you're not the only one.) Also, according to Weebly's site statistics, I finally seem to be gaining some traction with regular visitors. I create these projects because I have an insane love for the original media, and really want to own three-dimensional representations of its characters. The whole reason I take the time to photograph them and do write-ups about the projects, though, is for you guys. So, thanks for visiting. It makes me feel less like I'm shouting in the dark and more like I have something approaching a fan following. |
DAVID GRAHAM EDWARDS
Illustrator, writer, painter, sculptor, collector of toys and cats, observer of things. Categories
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