The nature of the beast

If you're anything like me it's no big deal if your bear breaks, you can just turn it into a Zombie. Zombies are meant to have bits missing, but why did it break in the first place?

Well it's the nature of the beast I'm afraid.

I know your bear isn't a toy, it's a collectible figurine for proper grown ups, but toys are a good place to start.
Your average toy figurine for kids is made from injection moulded plastic. An aluminium or steel two part hard mould is produced and hot melted plastic is injected into it. The mould it's self will cost about £1000. But that's just for a simple mould, to make one part. more parts means more complexity, that means more money.
The big toy companies make this pay by selling a million. (when you sell a million the percentage of cost attached to tooling is small) and they're all painted by machines.

The bears are made a completely different way.

We use rubber moulds.
The nice thing about rubber moulds is you can bend and peel the mould away from the figurine (some thing you can't do when the mould is made from metal) This means that we can add much more detail to the figure. The material used isn't plastic, it's a poly-resin. This process lends it's self well to short runs in production. because after a while the rubber starts to absorb the resin and eventually there's so much resin in the rubber the rubber and the resin stick together then the mould rips, and you've got to make another mould from your original. (The most I've managed to get out of a mould myself is 50)

So the resin is good for extra detail and short runs. Making your bears rare and highly detailed, but poly-resin is brittle, and will break like plastic won't.
Sometimes we fuck things up in the packaging and bears get broken before they even get to you. This happens because we are always trying to push the boundaries of what you can do with the medium, and sometimes we go too far (sorry) having said that we have noticed that some collectors are plagued with receiving broken bear after broken bear, whilst others don't get any. It's probably not your postman himself, kicking his sack up the street, but the sorting office must resemble a wild west bar fight.

On a separate note, we're bad taste, what with all the drugs and sex with sheep, but how bad taste are you? Leave an anonymous comment and tell us your secret. How weird are you lot?

Pimp that bear part 2

Right so where I left off yesterday, I was just going to paint the thing.
If you've ever been in the Painting tent at any of our events you'll know me as the one who knows how to mix brown, but to tell the truth that's all I do know when it comes to painting.(they don't let me paint bears here at work) but, hey, how hard can it be?

The paints we use here we get from games workshop. Every colour has an interesting name like blood red, or scab red, or skull white.
I've gone for rotting flesh green because it's a Zombie isn't it.
You do pick a couple of things up from sitting next to Gav (Gav paints all the original, originals). Always mix a bit of water in with the paint. I think that this is to stop the fur getting filled up with paint.
Don't try to paint it all in one coat. You may need to let it dry and go over it again.

And a nice little trick is the 'wash'. Which is where you mix up a really watery colour so that it only rests in the details. This was painted with Rotting flesh green with a wash of chaos black over the top, once it dried.

Oo, look I scratched a crack in the skull and the wash has filled it nicely.

Nearly there with it. That Parrot looks a bit healthy though...

That's better

Bit of blood too. On his shirt and leaking out of the open eye sockets.
Humm nice.

There we have it. A one off original. A unique. Dead Jack. Only one in existence

I've done all this at work. So I guess it belongs to Bad Taste Bears. Maybe we'll put it up for auction, or use it as a prize one day. Who knows...

Pimp that bear

Oo, nasty! My lucky Jack just took a tumble off the top shelf. (note to self, Frisbee is to be played outside in future).
The broken crutch is easy enough to fix. A dab of glue should sort that out.
But there's also this nasty chip in the hat, coupled with the usual paint-off-nose thing.

Humm, what to do? What to do? I could paint the chip out with some chaos black paint from games workshop. Or...

I could attack it with one of these! A dremel tool! Yes that's what I'll do.
The top of his hat's a mess, but if I try to make him into a zombie pirate, I'm going to have to make even more of a mess of it...
And if it is going to be a zombie I might as well go for it, and dremel off his eye patches, and go for the whole hollow eye sockets look.
Aw yeah, that's what I'm talking about. Bit of rough sandpaper should sort that out.

nice

Now this Zombie's looking a little too happy for me. So I need to have his moustache off, because that's a dead give away that he used to be smiling.
Ah and look at his cheek. The bit I've got in the dremel has a flat end so the hole I make has a flat bottom. Look, you can see his skull now.
There's a patch of skin missing at the back now too.
Now i need to get something sharp and scratch in the fur that's missing...

Lovely

Ive dremeled out some of his cheeks too to give them a hollowed out look, but I still need to get rid of that smile.
Now comes the car body filler...
Humm, messy, but some sandpaper will soon sort that.
Great. I've smoothed off the filler and used the dremel to make a nice Zombie mouth.
Needs painting now.

Is there such a thing as too Bad? Humm

Most of the time a drawing comes from Pete, and goes straight the sculptors.
It's that simple.

Sometimes things have to be altered to stop it breaking in the post (Yes I know that does still happen sometimes, but we try our best. Honest)
Sometimes they need to be tweaked so that they'll stand up. But as far as possible we try not to mess with it too much.

Then there was this little fellow a couple of years ago. He had us all split as to whether or not he should be made.
"Yes! Do it!" I hear you shout, and half the office was with you on that.
Then you think to yourself "Humm, what if we do it and we put it out there, and the next day someone has another go at blowing up the London underground?"
Humm... what do you think? I still don't know.
Then sometimes Pete has an idea that can be done more than one way. He often does a sketch with alternative this and that. Most of the time there's very little in it when it comes to which way to go.
Both ways are more often than not equally as funny.

Liberty was never meant to be funny. It's more of a comment on the times we live in.
But she had us scratching our chins all the same.

The gun she holds in the real one is an M16. (the gun the US army use over in Iraq) but there was the choice to use the AK47. The much loved weapon of choice for Terrorists the world over.
This would have made the comment that the U.S. had become the terrorist. It changes the feel of the bear doesn't it.



Everyone thought that little transfers on the glasses of the twin towers burning would be going too far.