Archive for the ‘Vinyl’ Tag
Incubot Productions is the brainchild of ToyboxDX founder Alen Yen, and is his venue for his original toy designs. Incubot first released the PVC Nekobot USB Flash drive, with is an excellent little figure, and its USB-ness is a good excuse to leave it in your pocket or backpack. The Nekosaurus sofubi, however, is all toy, and an expression of Alen’s love and appreciation for classic Japanese toy funk. The actual figure is sculpted by Kiyoka Ikeda of Gargamel, and produced in the Gargamel factory in Japan, so it is a pure and perfect Japanese vinyl. This first release is the crystal Nekosaurus, complete with paper inserts featuring mechanical gut detail designed by Alen himself. The guts are just jammed pack with really well thought out detail, and crystal really is the right word to describe the vinyl… it’s perfectly clear and flawless. The vinyl and the guts are fantastic, but my favorite part of the toy is hands down the actual sculpt… it is a perfect melding of classic sensibilities and vinyl toy design, and just a phenomenal toy to play with. It’s bigger than a fight figure, but smaller than a standard sized kaiju, around 6″ tall, and fits in your hand perfectly.
Neko looks good and plays just as well, and there are just a few left after the December preorder, available at the Incubot site here: http://incubot.com/sofubi.html Nekosaurus triumphs over other vinyl toys, and is just plain fun. Pick up a Nekobot Flash drive while you’re there!
It Came from Skullbrain II is the second (now annual) showing of customs made by artists at Skullbrain.org, organized by and held at Super7 in San Francisco. My contribution is a M1GO GID Manda entitled “Sodor” after a particular Chinese Dragon any child should know. The show opens this Saturday!
Grail time here… I got back to school yesterday, and today went to the mail room to track down an elusive score. Conspicuously absent from my Neo Eyezon shoot was this Tokyo Magazine exclusive release via Dream Rockets. This guy has an orange rub and green sprayed accents on GID vinyl, and was actually the first production GID release, which snuck under most people’s radars. The rub work admittedly is not amazing on this figure when compared to some of the Ream X Head, but the colors are great.
I also snapped a couple shots of the eclectic mix of vinyls that made it to school with me… there’s a few other toys here as well, but there’ll be time for that later.
EDIT: Added at the end is a shot of the three newest Neo Eyezons I received in the mail today. The two two-tone figures are the latest release in Japan, and the red with silver and green spray figure is actually one of two Christmas-themed figures painted by the legendary Goto-san himself. I hadn’t seen the Christmas one before, and was thrilled when I opened the box. I’m also looking forward to adding the Kikaida colored figure to my slowly growing Kikaida tribute color group.
I finally got around to taking a family shot of my Neo Eyezon collection so far. I have every regular release except one (a magazine exclusive in Japan that I am trying to track down), as well as the Max Toy Club Halloween figure and two show-exclusive Mark Nagata handpaints. I cannot wait to see what new Neo Eyezons show up this year!
The Red clear Eyezon I was working on needed a little revision, and here is the final result. The new brighter eyes really pop alongside the shiny colors, and the blacked out back eyes add some interesting contrast.
Guiro Seijin is a very cool kaiju from Ultraman Leo, with a very distinctive painted toy:
http://www.clubtokyo.org/listings/itemListingRpt.php?catID=1&subCatID=12&contentID=1722
I love the paint work and figure, but could never afford the vintage figure. Somehow I thought the Real X Head Gatchigon sculpt kinda, sorta, maybe reminded me of the Guiro Seijin, so I decided to see how the Gatchigon would look in these colors… the end results came out really neat, even if I feel like I cannot have been the first person to think of this custom. This guy was fun to paint; the loose spray vintage style was very different from the tight and detailed spray work I usually do.
I finished this latest Kaiju Eyezon over the weekend and snapped some nice bright pictures today. The goal for this figure was to change it up from the earthy potato palette of the first two Eyezons, and go with some much brighter colors, and a much greater emphasis on the clear and the visible guts. I’m really happy with how this one came out… the colors have a great deal more subtlety than my other figures, with many layers, while still retaining a surprising amount of clarity. The silhouette of the guts can be made out with the figure in your hands, and up against the light, this figure goes up like a Christmas tree. I cleaned off a few critical spots of paint so that the guts could really be seen in-hand.
Hedorah the Smog Monster is one of the most iconic of the Godzilla enemy kaiju, even if Godzilla vs. The Smog Monster is one of the most divisive of the Godzilla films. With his many forms, Hedorah brings destruction to Japan as revenge for their polluting ways. This particular sculpt is by M1GO, representing the most recent Godzilla: Final Wars version of Hedorah, in lovely brown chocolate-ey vinyl from the latest Lucky Bag. The color was so fantastic and made Hedorah look like a giant sewage monster, so I wanted to keep most of the base vinyl color and run with the sewage palette. The green ooze is shiny on a matte figure, with wet looking dark brown in he crevices of Hedorah’s body, giving it a wet and dry ‘made of poop’ look that I think really works for the monster.
Working on another clear Eyezon with guts… this time, the colors are going to be much more wild, starting with the guts. There is going to be a much greater focus on the guts this time, so the paint work is more extravagant, and I tried something new on the clear body. I sprayed the body with multiple coats of Future, inside and out, before I put any paint on it, so it should be much more clear than the first clear Eyezon I did. I will update with some pics of the guts installed once I do it.
Elegab is the work of a single man in Japan, and is cranking out some of the most original vinyl kaiju available right now. All of Elegab’s stuff has a rougher hand-made feel, and the figures never sacrifice on the fun factor. The Shuttlegon here is a towering monster held into some kind of containment suit with a jetpack and mechanical wrench-arm that can grab and hold mini figures! This custom is painted on the Glow In the Dark blank that was released a few months ago… I also have a blank Monster Patrol Car (another amazing toy) to paint up some day. I wanted to try using more colors than I usually do, and used a shiny finish instead of my usual matte. The metallic bits are all Future shiny and look like candy, and all of the organic bits were hit with a 50/50 Future and Vallejo Satin mix. The eyes were painted to match the production Elegab pieces with a thick and rough white and black combo. The horns and claws and teeth are all the base GID vinyl, and the whole figure still glows really well through the paint. Glow shots to come tonight.
Prometheus Rising Studios 