Screaming Angels and Demons...

Hey hey!!! Wow, have I been lax with the ol' Blog! Not a recent piece of work ,I think I was sculpting this at the end of 2012(!), but still something I'm proud of and think still looks good a year or so down the line, the Screaming Angel! Sculpted out of a combination of Magic Sculpt and SuperSculpey, it was fantastic to do a bit of real world practical work after all the digital stuff I do these days!

 Produced as a cold cast polystone bust by Titan Merchandise, the Screaming Angel has been, so I hear, a good seller!

 Ahh crap, you blinked, didn't you?

The cat's out of the bag!

First off, please let me apologise for the horrible cat pun title. I was going to go with a far more random and obscure reference, but I eventually declined. This is, quite possibly, the most famous thing I have ever, or will ever work on! The beacon of hope in the eyes of millions, the Monopoly cat! No more will cat lovers have to settle for the Ship or Top Hat, the Iron or Motor Car, now, there is this little guy/gal!

 As an absolute cat freak, I mean uhh, cat lover, I was more than happy to sculpt this little dude up!

 To get a better feeling of the final result, the little guy was rendered up in Keyshot to get that real metal feel!

Hasbro wanted to replace one of the original movers with a new one, and started this campaign to vote the new and most popular mover in!

It was a landslide victory for the cat, who proved so popular that he/she beat all the other contenders, even the robot!!!

 

http://news.msn.com/pop-culture/meow-monopolys-new-cat-is-in-iron-is-out

 

The cat proved so attractive that the cardboard cutout on the voting stand at the Hasbro booth in the 2012 London Toyfair was stolen! I'm just glad that I got to sculpt it, because the other digital sculptor at Designworks is a DOG PERSON! 

The Eleventh Hour! The Eleventh Doctor Matt Smith laser scan clean up!

LASERS! PEW PEW PEW! Nope, not that kinda laser, the non lethal real kind. At Designworks Windsor we have a 3D laser scanner, which allows us to capture a persons' facial contours. I'm sure you're up on the whole scanning thing, it's been happening for a while, now. Still, it's really cool!
So we scan Matt Smith, the data is correlated and refined in a computer, then the product is something like this:

 

Laser scanners can't really deal with fine uneven textures or shiny things, so eyes and hair are lost in the scanning process. The eyes are replaced, and I tend to recreate the back of the skull to help visualise hair:

 I split facial features up in Freeform Modelling Plus to help get sharp, defined lines between the details, like the eyelids, lips and nose.

 Now I start to block in the hair and eyebrows.

 Here is a render of the final head from Freeform Modelling Plus.

 The piece is then scaled, and the neck joint is placed onto it to fit the practically (real world, modelling putty/clay) sculpted body! This is then printed in the highest possible quality by Gary Miller at Industrial Plastics, who do all our Perfactory printing, http://ipfl.co.uk/

 

The head is then cleaned up, sprayed grey and placed on the body! Due to the fact we were working on the action figure months before release, Matts' hair had changed between the reference images we were given and when shooting started, so the hair was amended practically! This figure was then tooled (molded) in silicone, cast in resin, and then these casts were sent out to the Far East to start production of the toys! HUZZAH! Toys for everyone!