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Here's a commission I recently completed. The brief was simple, a 21st Birthday; Sidrah (the birthday girl) hugging Sulley.


Interestingly (or not) in my old life as a toy designer, I drew Sulley from Monsters Inc. a hell of a lot - I even sculpted him to be made into a pen. So I was very familiar with the character already.

Here's my sculpt, for that pen. This is one of a small number of casts that I still own out of numerous characters I sculpted during my 12 odd years.

Again, interestingly, or not, as the case may be, sculpting the character to look right with all that fur and so that it would come out of an injection mold tool was, in places, a bit tricky...

Here's the pen, as was available with Smarties as I recall.

As was often the case, the sculpting I had done, for some reason got over worked in the production piece, leaving the finished article looking less like the character than the sculpt that I had struggled to get approved by Disney/Pixar's licensing department.

Looking back at this, I'm surprised by how naff it really is. That was the nature of the beast though, cheap give-aways, by their very definition are a bit naff.

Let's not delve too deeply into my murky past as a toy designer now though. Let us instead focus on, as has becoming increasingly the case with my posts, the process stuff (for this commission).

The sketch work, which I will admit got jiggered about with in photoshop once I scanned it. In fact I totally reworked the likeness. Also adding a sketch-up model of a suitable door that I bunged together very quickly... I still like the flexibility that a sketch-up model gives, should I need to reposition the camera for a different view, I don't have to work out the perspective again... some might think it overkill or even cheating, but, I'll never have to draw a door again and worry that the perspective is wrong.