Allright the Release of the 3.5″ HEARTWOODS is coming closer!
To ease your waiting time till then, i’ve just trown in some WIP pictures from the process of making these wooden guys! Take a look and see how i made the HEARTWOODS out of finest Walnut & Maple wood with a lot of love to every single piece! 
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Tonight! tonight! It’s the night to view the premiere of ART OF TOYS! show at TASTY Gallery and meet many talented artists. Show opens tonight (6-10pm) visit 7513 Greenwood in Seattle!
I would love to be there by myself, but i had the chance to send over six of my HEARTWOODS (3 Maple & 3 Walnut) to hold the fort for me there! :] Be sure to visit this show if you are in the area, there is plenty of fresh resin & vinyl by Jon Malmstedt of Ramapage Toys and other local artists as well! I will post more pics soon!
UPDATE: Jon Malmstedt from Rampage Toys just send me over some pictures from the show! :] More Art of Toys Show Opening Night Party pics here!
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Last week i did my first custom 3″ Dunny for the Custom Toy Union Battle Bracket! I usually work on my own toy ideas and build up my figures from scratch, but this was a great chance to do a design on a platform toy! I had so much fun to do this little fella! Just finished him in the last minutes before deadline for the battle! Read more about this thrilling competition HERE! at the CTU forums.
aaaaand the winner is…. SHAPESHIFTER by pepe! Winner announcement & all the other amazing entries HERE! Thanks so much to all CTU members who voted for my design trough the three rounds and in the final battle!
now check the entry photo and some WIP pictures where you can get an idea of how i made this tiny wizard:
as a small goodie, i took a short video where you can see all sides of SHAPESHIFTER and how the magic wand is working! ^____^
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Here at smallstuffstudio we’re always keep an eye out for new tools to do small series of top grade handcrafted Designer Toys. To be able mold & cast larger resin toys we decided to start building our own Rotocasting Machine! This is a project in collaboration of Pepe head of smallstuffstudio and swiss based artist Inigo Gheyselinck who does stunning ceramic work. After many hours of research and some technical advice from the very best sources we think we are able to build this double rotating monster!
We would like to share all our experience and researches in this continuous tutorial series with our readers! When we have this thing up and running we’ll also share all resources and technical plans here. Our DIY instructions aren’t the only way to build a rotocasting machine so feel free to tweak it to your needs/size and take this more as a guideline. If you have questions or helpful suggestions & improvements about this rotocasting tutorial please drop a comment or send us a email to info [at] smallstuff.ch
Now let’s get ready to rumble!!! :]
Before we start with a quite large project like this, it’s essential to do some technical researches and find suppliers for the hardware you will need. When everything is more or less definite about the materials you want to use, you can start to draw building plans. This is the most important step and if you do this properly it can save you a lot of time and money!
You can see in the first picture our plan of the support rig and the two rotating frames printed in scale 1:5. Also the two X axis and the Y axis for the inner frame are defined so far. Now we begin our adventure with building the two frames. For the frames we’ll use 40x20mm hollow aluminum profiles. You can easily go with a smaller diameter or even with wood timber but our intent is to build a sturdy machine with a long lifetime. First we saw the eight hollow profile to the precise length we need and bevel the sharp edges on each side ot them.
Here you can see aluminium profiles of the two frames ready for further machining. Click on the thumbnails to see the pictures in a larger resolution.
To bolt down the frame profiles we’ll use aluminium blocks with two screw threads which will fit inside of the hollow space at each end of the four shorter beams. We also have to chamfer these slightly to fit perfectly. Of course you can also use angle brackets outside to do this join.
In the next session we will assemble the two rotating frames, drill the metric screw threads, the holes for the axis and do the two beams for clamping the mold in the middle of our inner frame.
One of the tricky parts of this project will be the power transmission from the main frame to the inner frame. We’ve been watching videos of the home made rotocasters people have made and it’s kind of confusing to see how many people have used the same gear on the main shaft as on the secondary shaft. That’s not very good at all, because the mold should rotate with a slight out of sync movement, this helps to better distribute the resin. We will cover this subject in a following part of this tutorial series.
As i mentioned, we are also willing to share here on smallstuff.ch our material take off and the finished & revised plans for free after everything works as it should. We hope this motivates you to start with your own rotocast machine and you will stay tuned for Part 2 of the Rotocasting Machine Tutorial! :]
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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! :]
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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
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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!
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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!
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“GOBBO” – a hunting trophy i brought back from the swamps
support my design & VOTE now on DeliciousDrips for my GOBBO Skully Custom:
deliciousdrips.com/submissions/submission.php?i=421
-> short update: WIP Making of Slideshow of GOBBO
GOBBO made it to the 3rd place in the PVC Contest!!! HERE are the results
thank you all for your support & the votes for my custom Skully GOBBO!
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Hell hell hell…. No nut stays uncracked when he comes!!!
walnut wood & brass eyes / high-gloss finish
handcrafted, iron-branding signed & numbered by pepe
available next month in our SHOP!
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.
Check it out here! – Right of my head into 3D
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