Lightsabers- fun on a stick!

After the Blu ray release of all the Star wars films I was inspired to build a Lightsaber.

 I found The Custom Saber shop which was producing beautifully machined aluminium pieces.

 Met some really nice people and built something that would not look out of place mounted as a piece of art. (Thanks to Tim the shop owner's skills... I just assembled it)

Add to that Plecter Lab's amazing sound card, and the only difference between these sabers and the film's is that they are much less hard on the bric-a-brac when swinging the thing around. Long story short, I produced this poster in appreciation of Tim's workmanship.

Fashion in space

Don't leave Earth looking like a meteorite just hit you! Fire retardant, magnetically locking, zero G proof fashion is just 18 million dollars away!

Amazing X-Ray specs

How I longed to possess the many goodies offered up, for mere cents, in the pages of the comics that were my staple diet of reading literature in my youth. Gorilla masks, sea monkeys, life size skeletons: most fascinating of all was the promise of seeing through walls, bodies and even - gasp - clothing! But America might as well have been Mars for an Australian boy in the 1960s -70s. Many years later the purchase of a pair of coloured cardboard glasses, two tiny eye holes overlaid with fine wire being the 'mechanism' for the promised 'X Ray vision' made me realise I was much better off wishing and desiring, than to have those dreams fulfilled. How many times has THAT philosophy borne true.

Warner Bros The Iron Giant

This was for a Canadian Art gallery some years ago. I cannot remember their name, nor find them on the Net any more. The Iron Giant was a great film with a wonderful message. Rowena (Bolton) helped with the images and came up with the great name 'Pax Ray'.

Mr Atomic

Stuff these in your fully automatic and watch the world disintegrate.

About the size of a SCUBA tank. Forged steel body. 
Bakelite fuse well antenna. Modelled on the rare 1960s Mr Atomic battery operated tin robot from Cragstan The blue models contain potassium nitrate for flash suppressant. The rarer silver ones, 28 pounds of slotted stick propellant. Do not expect to get up when on the wrong end of these buggers.

Batman 1943

The first Batman on film had him driving a Cadillac, and when I saw the episode of him using a RAYGUN! I just had to do a similar picture. Boots that were made from cloth, floppy ears and a cliff-hanger every week. I loved these serials. This is the last Photoshop image where I had to use a mouse as my 'pen' having finally bought a tablet.
Make some pop corn and check out the serials sometime. So much fun.

My tribute to Rudolph Zallinger’s Great Dinosaur Mural at the Yale Peabody Museum

When I was young I had a beautiful book, that included fold-out pictures, called 'The world we live in', published by Life magazine. 
One of these fold-outs was of a panoramic scene showing dinosaurs.

I later learned this image was actually a giant mural, painted by Rudolph Franz Zallinger, and displayed at the Yale Peabody Museum in Connecticut. These images are my tribute to those paintings, that had such a large effect on my early life.

I could not decide which colour I liked best.

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This dinosaur is actually part of a larger design, with it facing a giant butterfly, the two surrounded by roses. I imagine it will be finished before 2014.

Box for designer toy Buffalo Dreamtop.

Cutey Squid.

Deep, deep in the Earth's' Biosphere, far far below the intertidal meeting places. Beneath the Epipelagic zone, down, down past the twilight mesopelagic, bathypelagic and abyssopelagic, to finally the deepest,... coldest,... blackest. Where no man, and fewer bunnies, have touched. To the hadal zone.
There, under the pressure of a thousand atmospheres, floating just above tectonic plates whose surface lay covered in an ooze of mud and deceased pelagic organisms hovers...Cutey Squid!This adorable little fellow likes spending his endless nights collecting luminescent photophores, and rare 1950s bubble gum cards. For a good time call 055-0986337. Calls are $4.30 per minute.

Designer Toys- Designs for limited edition, urban vinyl, toys, art and collectibles

From the Trechbet series of Vinyl toys, a series of seven. 

Valveron, from the Dome robot series. Vinyl and Perspex. 

The Pasture range of Vinyl Toys includes one of my first designs.
Tribble-bit was originally a stamp.

Onti Octopule range, series of eight ocean going  molluscan phylum Cephalopoda.Fun for all the family!

Another of the Onti Octopule range. Soulegg.

I would like to see this realised in a stretchable vinyl, also imagine him smelling of vanilla.

One of the first designer toys I illustrated. The first in the Dome Robots series.
Dombermite.
Still working out the design possibilities of filling his head up with liquid or something akin to a snow dome.

Series of six Masque Toys. Designed to fit on a generic body.
Proffesser was so named because once I finished him he reminded me of the 'professor' from the old TV series of
Felix the Cat.

Growing up on a steady diet of Kellogs Frosties allowed me access to some of the most evocative memories from my childhood, Cereal Toys!
In between what seemed like so many breakfasts...a new box finally! Pulling out the pillow of cellophane, trying to spot the prize through  that mist.
Flicker rings!, lassoing cowboys ,their horses kicking up dust at the twist of a wrist. Camel trains, stretch pets... they actually WORK!! Crater Critters, actual aliens... before school even! Noodle Nodders,that snake in a log, and the hippo, the mechanism was so smooth, his mouth just kept going and going,  this stuff was better than television! and one of the best series, the Totem Tribe. So smooth, almost chewable, and they fitted onto each other so perfectly, soft plastic, sensual form and wondrous colours.
Zoom ahead 40 or so years, and  and it is season for a tribute.
 Buffalo Dreamtop is my memory of those wonderful totem figures, blended together and twisted by time. With the smell of Play Doh in my nostrils, and the feel of silly putty under my hands  So thank you, to whoever thought some kid would scream the supermarket isle down to get his hands on anything that looked like a toy, even a tiny piece of plastic stuffed in a cereal box. But what giants they seemed to me then.