Monkeywiz

I’d always had it in the back of my head that at some point in the far flung future I’d like to create my own range of limited edition collectors toys similar to the kind of things that can be found over at Kid Robot but based on characters I’d create for my own animations, so that they’d have their own ‘life’ that people could follow in a kind of episodic nature, as and when I found time to animate them.

I was vaguely aware though that to create a bunch of toys you need money. Money for prototyping, money for mold making, and money to get a whole bunch of toys cast, painted and stored, with no prior guarantee that they would be popular enough to sell, so money that you might never see again.

Then a week or two back Angry Zen Master had a cool post about Hiroshi Yoshii’s Blog and how he’s hand making his own range of toys. It’s all in Japanese so I have no idea how/what he’s doing other than what you can see in the pictures (some of which are fairly informative admittedly), but it has inspired me to see what I can do at home with my very meagre budget.

Back in the distant past I used to like to make things and dabble in the odd bit of sculpture, but the only things I’ve made in the last 5 or more years is the odd bit of rickety splinter ridden shelving to hold my ever increasing collection of books comics and DVD’s, so where to start? Whether it’s the wrong way or the right way, I guess is part of the reason for going through this process, but to see what I’m up to and how far I’ve got, go to my new Toy Making page.

I was asked to edit a pre-existing interface called Chatties for a ‘create your own avatar’ flash app to accompany a text and webcam chat site Visual Chat to add a little more functionality and design a few sets of characters, this is one of the sets I came up with. You can find a version of the interface on my ‘Stills’ page or go to the Chatties site to compare it with the original.

Just like to post a quick thanks for Oni over at onezumi.com for mentioning me in her post the other day.

Both Oni and Harknell were very helpful giving me lots of advice and info about why they chose the tablet pc they did when I was looking to get one a little while back.

To see one in action I’d recommend checking out the tutorial vids they’ve posted over at YouTube and in the tutorials section on their site.