This Paisley Little Thing Called Love

Continuing on in the grand theme of nuclear warheads with brains comes Paisley Love. This bomb doesn't want to melt the flesh from your face, it wants to give you flowers and maybe even spoon in bed. He wants to show you that behind his cold metallic base and greased up gears that he does have a heart... and that it's on a string.

Paisley Love was the second design I had done for the 'Smart Bombs' line. It was originally going to be a different take on the Tin Man from 'The Wizard of Oz.' Depending on how long the line went, my plan was to design one for each of the main characters. After about a day, I deemed that idea to be quite dumb. Seen below was the original chest of Paisley Love before any real design was put into it. Yeah... not too terribly impressive is it?

After taking a step back and looking down (literally) I came up with the idea of adding the Paisley. I had a pair of boxershorts that had a very similar design and color scheme. They were great boxers, I loved them so much I wore out the elastic band on them. What better way to immortalize them than in plastic in the shape of a bomb with robotic claws. Below is the final digital version of Paisley Love. He had eight colors built into him, which in retrospect is a couple too many. It could easily have been knocked down to five or six in a crunch.

Sonuvabitchin'!

This doesn't really constitute as a 'Vault' since it's not really that old, but it's still really frigging cool. Behold Captain Bitchin'! The Captain was a product of Luke Milton that almost came to be in plastic form a couple years back. The pose would have likely been used as promotional material if we had gotten that far. The entire image is nothing more than a poor attempt at ripping off The Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End theatrical posters.

Captain Bitchin' is what you call a block figure. A glorified Lego man but bigger, badder and hell of a lot more articulation (moving parts for you non-toy geeks). There are over 100 characters in Bitchin's universe ranging from skeleton-less men, cannibalizing 'care bears' and guitar weilding zombies. Yes, it's THAT good. In the coming days (or weeks or months) I'll show some more artwork from the almost was toyline of kockBLOCKerz ranging from logo concepts to some more promotional material.

They say some of the deals you never make are the best ones. With hindsight always being 20/20, making this toyline probably wouldn't have ended nicely especially the way the economy recently shat all over the floor. We all saved some coin and some sleepless nights by quietly exiting out the backstage door. Down the road though who knows. It could work. Maybe even in the vinyl instead of plastic. Arr!

Today's Blog is Sponsored by the Letter A

This is technically an episode from "From the Vault," but personally for me, it's too cool. Back in 2005, the now defunct Palisades Toys contacted me about making some 3-D turnaround renders of the Sesame Street letters. These action figures would be geared more for adults, or really, really nostalgic kids. This was one line I was really excited to get into. I kind of started with the Muppet line at the tail end of the madness, missing out on a lot of key figures. With the Sesame Street line I was pretty much guaranteed to be working with characters like Cookie Monster, Ernie, Bert, etc... The Letter A was slated to be packaged with Guy Smiley (I think). In the end, only one Sesame Street character saw the light of day and that was Super Grover. The rest of Series 1 made it into production and got to the final stages before Palisades turned out the lights. Ah, what could've been!