Wild Woodland Friendos
Creating bootleg Moogle figures from sketch, modelling and casting to packaging and promotional material.
Polyeurethane figures, acrylic-based paints
After finishing my first round of art toys, the Sphynxdawgs, I was eager to move on to the next project, resulting in these Moogles Woodland Friendos. These are unashamedly bootleg Moogles based off the designs from the video game Final Fantasy IX. I love the design of these Moogles, maybe even more so than the Moogles from Ivalice.
I used Super Sculpey for the first time on this project which was a game changer. I have some experience with Monster Clay, but being able to fire pieces then build upon it was a lot of fun and opened up a lot of options for creating accessories.
Still being fairly new to the whole mould-making process, I experimented a little bit with brush on latex to see if I could make moulds from less materials. They didn't quite work out, but I'm optimistic about trying the technique again in future projects with proper guidance. For example, this article does a great job at demonstrating how to utilise liquid latex for mould making. I ended up reverting back to silicon, but I found the latex moulds exceptionally useful in the painting phase for masking.
Progress shots of the Woodland Friendos, Mushrooms and Sphynxdawgs.
The moulds turned out well but casting was a little rough. I used rubber bands to seal both mould parts together, resulting in some warping of the figures. Things were still a little off even with a generous amount of sanding which could have been avoided with proper casing for the mould.
Painting and accessorising was challenging but fun. This was my one of my first projects using an airbrush with varying results. Some of the accessories I made didn't end up fitting with the models after post-processing, such as the chest fuzz. I improvised with some realistic fur inspired by my cat's wrath against all things pom poms.
Packaging and Promos
Photos were taken of each model from different angles, then were touched up in Affinity Photo and the backgrounds removed. This was time consuming but made creating promotional collateral much easier. The packaging was simple, but I mistakenly printed the design directly onto the cardboard material instead of a suitable material for print. This resulted in the colours looking dull.
I made a short promo video for Instagram from the edited footage taken.
