The Workshop

Sometimes called the kitchen. In a studio apartment, you do what you can. Which sometimes means a big mess to be cleaned up when you're not exhausted from doing all the creating + the stuff you do to survive to create another day. The second cloud cast is in the front of the ranks (The Lady got the first one, cause she's The Lady). The purple thing is the mold, with a curing cloud inside (super hot that stuff, don't touch!). The paper cups are for the mixing/pouring, and the two plastic jugs are the two parts of the plastic mixture.


The thing that I think is just amazing is that for the longest time as a kid, I had wanted to make my own toys. I was always making paper action figures and lamenting their lameness. I got a knife and tried to carve action figures out of wood, and gave up because they would never EVER be as cool as the stuff you could buy. But years later, and even though I'm not necessarily going to be able to make jointed toys that have great articulation (maybe, but not with my current skill set) I'm still able to come up with a concept and put out something that's pretty darn cool, in a durable plastic that I can pour in my own kitchen. That's something that just blows me away.

I think once I get a few more clouds cast (which means buying some more casting material) I'll post the process of making a mold. I'm going to make a large mold with six or eight clouds in it, so that I can do a larger batch all at once. The other reason, besides just the larger quantity, is that this first mold was flawed because the original was flawed in a couple ways that I didn't see (and one that I did). The original had some space under the sides where the silicone crept in during the moldmaking process. So the mold ends up making some crazy looking bases for the toys. A little sanding on all of these castings, and then a new mold will get rid of that, and make the next generation a bit more easy to finish once I pop them out. With these I'll really have to do some heavy sanding to make them look nice.

Also not sure about the black eyes and mouth. Thinking I might do them in powder blue instead. The Lady was saying I might consider molding faces for them on top. That's definitely a possibility. I think though, that I want these to be customizable, if one wants to do that, so I may do some customizations like that on my own, and encourage others to buy blanks to do such a thing, but that the mass produced ones that I'm putting out (or as mass as I can do in my kitchen) should be smooth. That would allow for if you wanted to do a custom job of your own and not be married to one of my molded faces. I like the Munny for that reason, and that's definitely the reason Munny works so well for customizing.

If you're into toy customizing, let me know what you think of these. I'd love to get some feedback from people who do this stuff too.

Sanded and ready for molding

So tonight, I sanded down the cloud-y guy, and put a new face on him. This one has the eyes a little farther apart. I'm not sure if I like it better or not. I'm so happy with the way this guy looks now. I wasn't sure it would sand down as well as it did. Can't wait to see how he looks in white. Think this is gonna be really nice. I'll blog the molding and casting process soon.

cloudy days ahead.

Here's the strangely hued prototype of a cloud toy that I'm going to be producing soon. The actual toy will be white, with a couple variations planned which will be obvious when you see them. I did this one in yellow partly because it was the clay I had at hand, and partly because it made sense considering that it would be harder to see imperfections in white clay. So I'll be able to sand this one down and make him closer to perfectly round, and then go from there to making the mold. I'm pretty happy with this as a first attempt, but I may make a few different ones to see if another configuration works better stylistically. Or maybe I'll just make a few to make a few, and have a cloud family. I don't know yet. I'm thinking I'll likely do a short run and then maybe an extended run once I see if people dig them and are interested. Thinking about cute packaging too. Excited by the prospects, as I've always wanted to make my own toys, and this is a good start.

Stinkor

There's this teacher here at school, and he's world famous and a wonderful guy, but he has a peculiar odor to him. For a while I couldn't really place it. It's decidedly not B.O., and it's not even what you would call a bad smell. It's just unique. There isn't anybody who smells like this guy. I also wouldn't call it a good smell by any means. It's kinda earthy, but it also seems man-made. Is it a cologne? Not sure. Could it be something that just gets exuded from this guy's pores? Maybe?? I don't know.


Then, a while ago it hit me. I know EXACTLY what this guy smells like. He smells like Stinkor. I know. That doesn't sound like a good thing, does it? Well, it's not, but it's not a horrible thing either. See, I was real big into He-Man when I was a kid. I loved He-Man, and the toys were cheap enough, that my family could afford to get me a He-Man figure every now and again. They were like 3 or 4 bucks. No big. But after a while, there were just so many He-Man characters that to have them all you had to be a rich kid, or obsessed. I had a bunch. I had He-Man, and Skeletor, and Beast-Man, and Ram-Man (Ram-Man was my favorite, because he had spring loaded legs that would shoot him across the room if you aimed him right) and I had Castle Greyskull, and I even had a Snake Mountain playset which I got from a yard sale after I was by all rights a bit too old to be playing with He-Man figures. And while I won't bore you by listing all the figures I had, I'll just say I had a respectable collection of He-Man paraphernalia.


One figure that came out toward the end of the He-Man craze was a character called Moss-Man. He was the character that was featured in a show about saving the environment (and this was just a few years before Captain Planet came on with his mullet and his booming voice that put Smokey the Bear to shame) and he was green and furry looking-as a Moss-Man would be expected to be. Now, the Moss-Man figure had a special feature. He didn't have a wicked weapon or anything like that. He was a pacifist. What Moss-Man had was...well, air-freshener. He was green and fuzzy and he smelled like pine. Not real pine, mind you, but the kind of pine one associates with the tree-shaped pieces of cardboard that get hung from your rear-view mirror. And Moss-Man was mine. I loved him because he was fuzzy, and he smelled good, and he was a good guy that looked cool. I mean, how cool is a big muscle-bound green guy who feels like moss and smells like "pine"? Tres cool if you ask a seven-year-old.


But around the same time that the Moss-Man figure came out, there was another character who had a similar gimmick. Only he was a bad guy. I didn't have this figure, but I knew kids who did. Personally I couldn't see the point in buying this guy, because he had no appeal. Where Moss-Man was fuzzy, this guy was pretty run of the mill. Where Moss-Man's smell was pleasant and reminded you of cleaning products, this guy had a chest piece that covered up his OWN face, so that HE couldn't smell himself! His name was Stinkor, and he looked like a skunk. He smelled like a skunk...kinda. He smelled like a skunk in the same way that Moss-Man smelled like pine. I still remember thinking, "who IS this guy?" I'd never seen him on the show, whereas Moss-Man had gotten a whole episode to extoll the virtues of smelling like the trees.

And just now, when I went looking for a picture of Stinkor, I found this little tidbit from the guys who worked on the show (just for background, "The Horde" were a new line of bad guys at the time on the show and in the toys):


The male designers introduced each character with great excitement, relishing every nasty attribute they could name. The only hitch came when Stinkor was introduced. Arthur immediately vetoed a character that was basically a walking fart joke. Only two skunk characters have worked in cartoons to my knowledge; Pepe Le Pew and Flower from Bambi.Larry and I thought of a dozen hilarious situations for Stinkor, Hordak, and She-Ra. Things like;Stinkor enters the room and Hordak turns his arm into a giant match;Stinkor gives away the Horde's position in an ambush because of his scent;Stinkor sprays a cloud of gas at the rebels and She-Ra turns her sword into a giant fan and blows the stink back causing the Horde to pass out; that sort of stuff.There was a character named Perfuma in She-Ra. She and Stinkor would have made a fragrant combination. We even thought of a thirty second moral ending about air pollution, and one about the effects of different foods, like beans, on digestion.


All of that is to say, Stinkor never made it to TV. And he sat on the shelves like a toystore pariah, unsellable and double packed into every crate of He-Man toys I'm sure. He was a character that only a few kids I knew of had, and they only had him because they had EVERY figure. You gotta have Stinkor if you want to have them all. So because of those people, I know what Stinkor smelled like. And our faculty member smells like him. Kinda like skunk. Maybe it's Jovan Musk or something. But it's really funny to me, because every time he walks into the room, I envision this: