This month I've been taking care of the new house quite a bit (touching up the paint, murdering the dandelions in the lawn, etc.) so I wanted to do a fairly simple project this month. I decided it was finally time to tackle the Beamer, who is a little different in that it's a piece of technology from Final Fantasy IV and not a traditional "monster" per se. But, you encounter it and get into battles against it, so it's a monster for all intents and purposes. I've been putting off building the Beamer for a long time, partly because I had no idea how I was going to build the thing. I knew that it had sort of a vaguely acorn-shaped piece, and a spherical piece, and a disk-shaped piece, but I didn't know how to put that all together using parts I had laying around. My subconscious mind must have been working on it for me, though, because once I started, everything just seemed to come together on its own. I think you'll agree it turned out rather nicely!
0 Comments
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! My family is moving out of the condominium where my wife and I have lived for 17 years, and my kids have lived their entire lives. It involves a lot of tape, a lot of stuffing things into boxes, and a lot of people complaining when I've inadvertantly packed up something they still wanted access to, like medicine or food or the family cat. I could have decided "well, I'm moving, so I'm definitely not doing a project this month" but then I decided after taking the entire year of 2021 off, I do have some catching up to do, and I definitely don't need to get into the habit of making excuses every month. So, I packed up everything in the workshop except for my work bench and model paints, and I managed to build the Mage, the tricky tentacled trouble-maker with a taste for... uh, trouble? Terror? That's as good as it gets. My thesaurus is already packed away in a box somewhere. Now, however, I really do need to pack up the model paints and paintbrushes. I'm not sure what April 2022 is going to look like yet, but I'll certainly make a solid, half-assed effort to come up with something in about a month! 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! Let us never speak of 2021 ever again.
Yeah, no update this month. I've been hard at work writing novels. Gotta divide my creative efforts sometimes. Happy New Year, and good riddiance to 2020!
This month, the kids are out of school again (thank you, COVID-19, for your systematic attempts at demolishing the public education system). So, I've spent a lot more time than normal yelling at children between the ages of eight and twelve—and then when that's done, I come inside and yell at my own kids as well. Also, my wife has been home recovering from surgery not once, but twice (what are the odds that carpal tunnel syndrome would strike in both her hands?). So I've been making her peanut butter toast and folding laundry and the various other things that I do in my role as her own personal emergency back-up hands. Not a lot of time left in the day to do very important , very silly things like painting toys.
About halfway through November I realized I still hadn't started any Final Fantasy IV projects. Finally, I said to myself, "Well, I'll just cheat and do the TinyToad—it will be super simple, super easy, and then I can pretend I actually did a real project this month!" And even that didn't happen. (I could teach classes on how to be lazy, but it seems like way too much work.) So, quite possibly no update for this month. Not unless I suddenly feel inspired right after Thanksgiving and decide what the world really needs is for me to crank out a TinyToad in a few days! Since I worked on the Marion and other puppet master characters from Final Fantasy IV last month, I thought that it would make sense this month to build the wooden dolls they actually control. There are four different types of them in the game: there's the EvilDoll and the Puppet, unliving marionettes who appear during random monster encounters, as well as the Cal and the Brena, two special dolls who appear only once in the game during a rather unusual boss battle. (Since next month is Thanksgiving, should I do my new-and-improved Chocobo figures next? They're kinda of like turkeys, I guess...) This month's set of three projects required a lot of work, no fewer than nine separate toys, and of course some good old-fashioned ingenuity in order to figure out how to combine them all together. There is a small group of monsters from Final Fantasy IV who will actually call forth other monsters to battle on their behalf. It's great if you're in the mood to grind for experience points, I suppose, but a bit annoying when you're just trying to get through the dungeon before you run out of Cure potions. These guys are the Conjurer, the Marion, and the Sorcerer. Honestly, the biggest problem I had was trying to figure out a good way to attach their little bird buddies to their backs! Not sure what next month's project is going to be yet. As I've said, I try not to lock myself into a specific schedule with these things because I don't want to hinder the creative process. |
DAVID GRAHAM EDWARDS
Illustrator, writer, painter, sculptor, collector of toys and cats, observer of things. Categories
All
|