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.
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I feel like I've been running at surge capacity since this whole pandemic thing started. I feel like I have the ability to endure hardship (I was married to my ex-wife for nine years, after all), but I feel like I've temporarily exhausted my ability to continue operating at peak performance.
I'm giving myself permission not to unveil any new projects at the end of the month so I can take a little breather. I've got some Final Fantasy IV related things I'm working on, of course (hint: it required three Dr. Teeth action figures from The Muppet Show) but they're not going to be ready this month. And that's okay. I haven't given up. A person who has given up does not spend insane amounts of money on the second-biggest robot toy HasLab has ever manufactured just so I can repurpose it into a Final Fantasy IV character. I'm just sayin'. I told you these would be ready soon. I just needed a couple of extra days, is all. Anyway, two of the creatures you will undoubtedly encounter in Final Fantasy IV are a couple of fish men, who appear at different times. They share the same game sprite design, but one is a greenish water-dwelling monster called the WaterHag and the other is a salmon-colored desert creature known as the Sand Man. They're roughly based on a monster from Dungeons & Dragons called the Sahuagin, which is why it may seem vaguely familiar. Well, you guys know me by now. I would certainly have heavily modified the original toys if it had been warranted, all in the name of matching the original 16-bit Super Nintendo game sprite as closely as possible. We have the technology. However, in this case, there was almost no modification necessary. As it happens, the Phibious character from the Matt Hatter Chronicles (a UK-based franchise) was already so perfect that I hardly had to make any changes to him at all. Utter serendipity! I had a large and particularly ambitious Final Fantasy IV project scheduled for this month. Then, for no real reason, we bought a new TV. Which necessitated clearing off the old entertainment center and packing up all our DVD's and CD's and video games. And reorganizing half the living room to accommodate the new entertainment center. And reorganizing the den to accommodate the old entertainment center. And reorganizing the laundry room to move some things into storage. It was a bit more work than I'd anticipated.
But, the new TV is amazing. We went from a 32" screen to a 70" and the difference is staggering. I'm seeing details in old school Nintendo graphics that I never noticed before (like Princess Toadstool's disturbing pink pupils). Anyway. After I realized I'd lost fully two weeks out of the month, I decided to work on a smaller, much less ambitious project. And I didn't get that done either. But, that's okay. I decided a while ago that I wouldn't let the calendar date dictate when a piece of art is or is not finished. It will be ready when it's ready. Here's a sneak preview of what's coming soon, though! This month I decided to tackle a rather challenging trio of Final Fantasy IV monsters. In addition to the many animals and fantasy creatures in the game, there are also a few ethereal, ectoplasmic entities whose game sprites suggest a certain wispy and insubstantive quality. How to represent that in three dimensions, one wonders? Well, I happened upon the existence of a great-looking vintage Dungeons & Dragons figurine, which is rather ironic considering how many creatures from the early Final Fantasy games were, indeed, based on monsters from D&D. Anyway, I spent a lot of time working on these guys, not just during the building and painting stages but also in sculpting some special figure stands to help support them for display. Without further ado, I present the Ghost, the Soul, and the Spirit, the last of which officially marks my 1ooth Final Fantasy IV project (if you tally them up somewhat selectively)! This update actually features two months' worth of projects, because I'm lazy and couldn't be bothered to take or upload photographs. (Hey, you try working ten-hour shifts and see if you have the energy to do anything when you get home!) So the first of these isn't actually a Final Fantasy IV monster at all, but rather a helpful creature you encounter within the game. The Big Chocobo is a massively oversized bird whose role in the game is to store weapons and items for you when you don't need them in your immediate possession. He's so cute that I couldn't have neglected to build some physical representation of him (and I think you'll agree the toy I found was absolutely perfect for him). Also, I took a stab at constructing two of the more unusual aerial monsters from Final Fantasy IV, namely the Raven and the Roc. They're sort of a weird bird-lizard hybrid, which means that since I started with a pretty normal bird-shaped toy, I had to do a lot of physical reconstruction in order to approximate their flying forms as we see them in the video game. What's pretty wild is that I managed it entirely by gluing parts to other parts, requiring no sculpting and making this a kitbash in the truest sense of the word (which is fine by me, since nothing grinds my gears worse than having a project melt in the oven!). See, I told you I'd upload photos of these projects eventually! So, the Fiend and Gremlin, arguably two of the more weird-looking monsters of Final Fantasy IV, have actually been a staple of the game series for a while. They originally appeared in 1988 (in different colors) as the Pit Fiend and the Imp, both creatures appearing in the 8-bit Final Fantasy II for Famicom in Japan (not to be confused with the Super Nintendo release called Final Fantasy II). The point of all this is that this style of monster was created for the series pretty early on in its life cycle, predating their 1991 appearance in the Super Nintendo version by a number of years. These projects were a little more elaborate than some of the other ones I've done. I guess one of the benefits of social distancing is that I've got lots of time to spend at home working on projects. Each of them even has a tiny voodoo doll hanging off his belt, which I think marks the first time I've ever built a toy that's carrying another toy. These are not the elaborate, in-depth projects I was hinting at last month, but I've already gotten these cool cats photographed and ready to unveil first, so here you go. The Panther and the BlackCat (yeah, I know, he's actually blue) are two of the more tricky enemies from Final Fantasy IV to dispatch properly if you encounter them before you're ready to actually fight them. They were a little easier than some of my other Final Fantasy IV projects because cats are something that exist in the real world, so there were figurines that I could buy off the shelf and only required a new coat of paint to bring them to life. I did, however, spend hours painting all those leopard spots by hand. (And then had to completely redo one of these projects a second time because my daughter decided to mess with it, only one day after I finished it!) It's the end of March and, thanks to COVID-19 taking control of the world as we know it, the local school has shut down and my kids cannot be trusted to stay home all day by themselves. So, I've been watching them and yelling at them and occasionally painting toys.
Since I had some extra time, I really went all out with these projects, rebuilding almost every aspect of the original action figures. I won't tell you what they are yet, but if you have any sort of familiarity with the monsters of Final Fantasy IV, you may already have a guess based on the above quote. If not, I guess you'll just have to wait a few more days. They'll be ready soon! So, not too long after I finished up a batch of four flying eyeball monsters from Final Fantasy IV, my daughter, who was about five years old at the time, decided to sneak them off my display shelf and play with them when I wasn't looking. I've explained to her that the toys that I've painted are only meant for looking at, not for touching, but that didn't stop her from trying to flap the wings, chipping paint off all over the place. She denies having done any of this, but I have several keen-eyed cats reporting to me, and they totally saw her do it. The truth is that I was never completely pleased with the wings, but of course I was limited by what existed on the market at the time. About two years later, I saw some How to Train Your Dragon toys in stores and kicked myself for not waiting and using those wings instead. Well, I generally don't make it a habit of redoing projects, but these toys needed to be repaired anyway. I figured as long as I was working on them, I would tear the old wings off and rebuild them. And, to be honest, they're immeasurably better for it. I also completely repainted the toys and they look so much better than they did the first time I worked on them. But, don't tell my daughter. So, without further ado, I'm very pleased to present the new-and-improved versions of the FatalEye, the FloatEye, the Plague, and the Red Eye. Since this was technically a redo, and not a new project unveiling, I'm going to try to squeeze in another project for March. Thanks to the coronavirus, the kids are out of school and I'm home with them for the next week [editor's note: more like four months!], so I imagine I'll have quite a bit of down time. I guess we'll see how it goes! |
DAVID GRAHAM EDWARDS
Illustrator, writer, painter, sculptor, collector of toys and cats, observer of things. Categories
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