Over the last few years i really have lose sight of sketching, drawing & painting. I’ve done a few scribbles and concept artworks but the most of my spare free time i’ve spended to create wood or resin toys. For these, i usually moved straight into sculpting or carving.
Now since two weeks i’m a proud owner of a Wacom Intuos4 pen tablet! I have to say this thingy really motivate me back to draw more stuff & it’s so much fun to work with! Here you can see a bunch of my digital experiments. I hope you like them! :]
After a break, smallstuffstudio is back on track! I had to move our studio and all the stuff i need for doing art & toys was packed up in big boxes for a few weeks. Now we’ve settled down near the beautiful Zurich lake and i’ve started with new toy projects right on!
We have a lot of fancy new things ready for you, so let’s start with some shots of the PANGAPANGA CREW! The PANGAPANGABLOCKS you might know allready, but now PANGABOSS is here to keep an eye on them! They will be available soon at my shop, just be sure to sign up for our newsletter and get all the news ahead of the others! (pssst… you can even win one of these guys!)
4″ PANGABOSS with his 2.5″ PANGAPANGABLOCKS by pepe
Fancy LEOpold II – 9″ Plush Monster
I was playing with the sewing machine again last sunday! “Fancy LEOpold II” is a little plush guy who loves to wait under childrens beds to scarry the kids with his pompon ears!
I was totally into plush last week and made my first experiences with a swiss “bernina” sewing machine. The first idea was to make a cute jellyfish out of this nice hearty fabric! Have to say, sewing is pretty tricky stuff…but fun!
my first plush toy: Jellyfish MELVIN (cotton, batting, glass eyes)
…now the next toy idea was to do kind of a squared elephant with big red hearts on his ears. so first i did some sketches, then cutting out all the parts out of different fabric and afterwards sewing this little fella together. To wander with my toy concepts trough all kind of materials and technics is for me a very inspiring way to see new connections and synergies in toy designs.
Little Hearty HELGO (fleece, cotton, felt, batting, glass eyes)
Sometimes i think i have to be an real apple-addict… ’cause i did his ears without planing anything, exact the size of an iPhone. They would fit easily as a cute cellphone cozys too!
Recently i gave a short interview for the urban street & designer toy blog of the t-ninja crew from Russia and told them about what’s SMALLSTUFFSTUDIO all about! Head over and read a bit more about me, all my wood & resin stuff and how i create my toys.
After the first wacky try to make a branding tool (HERE), i made me another tiny brass branding iron stamp for my wooden toys.
This time instead of using a common font, i did vectorize my signature and let the CNC mill do the work with a our smallest 0.3mm drill. Afterwards i made a brass mount with M2 screws for holding the stamp plate in position. The signature is approx 15mm long and i still have to get a feeling about long i have to press, till the signature is proper burned into the wood. But i’m pretty happy with my new tool and it works very good while clamped into a soldering iron.
Now all my new wooden stuff will get some hot mark on their butts for sure!
Have a bunch of wood & resin toy projects going on right now. I really hope i can release these little fellas as a DIY edition in march when spring is coming and the sprouts are growing! ^_^ Now i have a lot of details to sort out, especially how to export the cress seeds from the “Happy Gardening” Set i’m planing…
Meanwhile some WIP pictures of my first custom i’m working on: “Golden Age” AncientCritter. Hope you like him
4″ Wood Designer Toy by pepe
(pear- and maplewood, high-gloss finish)
Besides pushing my resin AncientCritters to get them ready for shipping, i felt like i should do another Wooden Toy for the Collection. The idea for this tiny giraffe came little by little while cutting and sanding the pet out of a rough wooden sheet and somehow i finally bring up to a round figure. There was no concept drawings or sketches for this design. I used pearwood for the body and maplewood for the smaller parts, then finished the piece with a high-gloss varnish to get all these sweet highlights.
PEARGIR will be soon available in our shop, follow me on twitter to get to know when he’s up for you!
Our Test labs are full of new organic experiments with all the different AncientCritters. We had to send out our best recources to get some new rare species and varieties for the “Happy Gardening” Kit
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