A while ago the artist known as AW177 contacted me about doing a collaboration.  I love his work because of its Eastern influences and slick finishes.  It\’s about as different from my own work as I think you can get.  Which is why I wanted to add his style to my portfolio.  However, it did present it\’s challenges.  For this piece I had to simplify my own style a it.  Much like my collaboration with Coolvader, I wanted to keep the surfaces as simple as possible so the surface could be worked with afterward.   The Madl platform only worked more to this idea with it\’s straight lines.  We decided on basing our concept on the ancient Chinese terracotta warriors.  So I went about simplifying the armor in basic shapes.  I used magic sculpt to create my shapes and sanded.  And sanded. The end result was a toy that I think would look pretty cool if manufactured. Hmmm, what do you think MAD?

Ever hear of the golem?  No, not Smeagol from the LOTR but the creature from hebrew folklore.  Legend has it that this humanoid man of earth could be controlled by inscribing the word emet (אמת \”truth\” in hebrew) on it\’s forehead.  This creature could not think for itself so instructions were placed in the golem\’s mouth.

My incarnation of this fable shows a young child summoning a stone golem to do her bidding.  You can see the shock on the child face as folklore becomes reality.  The beast is ancient and iron supports have been added here and there to keep it from falling apart.  Miracles are being conjured on this cold autumn evening.

This piece was created for and donated to the Milk Munny Exhibition.  The exhibition put on by artist Trevor Hill and being held at the Monorchid Gallery in Phoenix, Arizona, features vinyl art from a huge list of artists and will be donating the proceeds to the Keep a Breast Foundation.  That means this Mega Munny will be up for sale for an amazingly low price of $750.  Help out a good cause and buy it Oct 1st.

This is a late post, should have gone up last Friday when Coolvader showed me the work but I\’ve been insanely busy.

So yeah, last Friday he revealed his portion of our collaboration and my jaw hit the floor.  As I gazed at it and absorbed what I saw I began to realize how much I respect Coolvaders work.  First, it dawned on me that by keeping things simple Matt was allowing my sculpt to show through.  He could have easily added tons of little details that would have overshadowed anything I did. But secondly, it began to set in how well balanced the cute little bunny is with this twisted quadrapus-thing ripping out of the poor bunny\’s butt.  The red on white pops so vividly.

Initially I designed the sculpt to be a labbit that happened to have a eye and four tentacles coming off the butt.  But Coolvader interpreted the sculpt to be the eye and tentacles ripping out.  Thank goodness he did cause wow.  It creates such violent moment in time.

As you can tell, I\’m happy with the way this turned out.  What\’s great is that this is something I\’d never be brave enough to create on my own and put in my portfolio, but thanks to Coolvader I have this wicked piece to shock and delight.  Sorry Mom.

Fashioned after a greek statue, this commission was one of the toughest pieces I\’ve ever done.  And by tough, I mean Magic-Sculpt tough.  I miss sculpey and it\’s infinite working time.  Magic-sculpt is great for strength but until I get faster I foresee a lot of tooling in my future.  My dental tools got quite the workout over the last couple weeks.  So much so that I seriously have little feeling on my right middle finger due to the callus that has formed. But it\’s all good.  I\’m not complaining.  Really.  This guy was such a pleasure to work on.  I mean, it\’s like my client was giving me an assignment to work on my anatomy and what better reference material to work from than from the greeks.  Another interesting thing about thsi piece has that oringinally I added texture before the sculpt dried to make it look like the stone was old and weathered, however, because there was so much sanding and tooling, I lost a lot of it.  So in order to achieve the right look, I had to go to town on my smooth finish piece.  Picture me repeatedly stabbing my sculpt over and over with a pick, fork, plyers and other various tools.  My wife could not watch.  It was painful to us both.  But the result was good I think.

Here is the finished sculpt I did for the commissioned collaboration with Coolvader for Linh.

Lately the artist known as Task One has been revealing artwork showcasing his Photoshop skills and other artists custom toys.  Recently he asked me if he could have some high res images of my Celsius custom so he could play around and possibly make some art of it as well.  I was super excited about it because the work he\’s done so far has been steller.  Check over at Spanky Stokes for more info about it.

Over the weekend he send me a link to his facebook photo album where he had posted two new pieces to his collection.  If you\’re not a FB friend of his, you\’ll want to be so you can see his cool work.

Here are the two pieces he made. The surprise is that they\’re not even the Celsius piece.  When I met Task One down in LA at the Celsius show he had mentioned that he really enjoyed my Bogart custom and I guess he wasn\’t just saying that just to be nice because he took some time and really made my custom look amazing.  I think I\’m going to have to make myself a poster of these.

About 5 years ago my best friend from high school Christian and I decided to fill up our bored evenings and make our own video game.  Christian knew how to do all the programming and I thought I could handle the graphics.  We discussed doing a first person shooter, rpgs, but ended up deciding on an old fashioned arcade game. It\’s in the fashion of games like Luxor or  Zuma where sphere\’s accumulate and you need to clear them by matching three or more.  Our however had a bit of a twist.  Well, instead of me explaining it, feel free to download it and play it.  If you like, let me know.  I only have the demo version right now, I have to dig out the full.  If I find I might put that up as well.  Let me know what you think.