Progress

My personal toy progress lately has been a bit slow and has jumped around a bit. I did get pretty far into a sculpt for the prey. I sculpted it out of Willow Products 360 wax, and while it was nice to sculpt straight from wax it was a little difficult to work with and I think my sculpt ended up more static and rigid than I had imagined, so he's going to get re-sculpted. Willow has formulated a few new sculpting waxes that are more forgiving. They stick to themselves better and hold heat longer, so that'll make dynamic forms much easier. I have some samples en route right now.

I have a good reason for neglecting my personal projects though. I've been working on some commercial jobs. First up was some small hand sculpts for imm Living, a new industrial design company started by some people I knew from OCAD. The function of them are USB sticks and the form is hands in various hand signs. I made the two popular gang signs "East" and "West". They're currently being produced and will be available about mid February.

The second project was a series of 6" figures for a WWF commercial. The spot tracks the progress of the production of a compact flourescent bulb and all the pollution it causes along the way. The figures are the people that are blissfully helping it along. This project was a real push. They wanted 6 figures in two weeks. The only way to accomplish that was to sculpt them out of polymer clay so I could bake them and skip any sort of mold making process. Also I had to keep my sculpting time down to two or three days each. I normally wouldn't rush that much, but they really needed me and it was a great project and opportunity. Tara handled all of the painting again and really made them look great, hiding some of the rough spots created by rushing. I was also able to pull in Phil Woollam to make the light bulb prop and the larger scale hand to hold it, as well Ian Langohr to sculpt the panda logo. It was hard work but it was fun and rewarding. Here's the completed spot. This is the director's cut. You might run into the shorter more upbeat one on TV. The longer one shows more of my figures, so I like it better.



I also finally have a website. All thanks goes to James for hooking me up. It's very simple right now. We have some ideas for something that looks and functions nicer, but this does the job for now. You can see more shots of the hands, some more shots of the WWF figures as well as download my portfolio and resume.

www.lairdhenderson.com

As for the future, I'm currently developing some new products for imm Living, continuing production on Society of Hunters and doing some experiments for a new line of stylized wrestlers called U.L.O.C.

Stay tuned!

P.S. I apologize for the ugly webcam window. I switched from Stickam to Blogtv. It's a much better community. Stickam is full of bratty little kids and Blogtv is much more diversified. A window that doesn't fit my sidebar is a small price to pay.