P-4!

I can't remember the exact year, but back when the whole designer vinyl craze was ramping up I was asked to be part of an artist created series of characters that would be produced using PVC plastic. Unfortunately the project eventually imploded but I came up with this little guy I dubbed P-4 ( short for Power Plug Pee Pee ). I think he's pretty self explanatory...incidentally enough I had been working on some sketches for a guy on another project and he pulled the whole "if this works out, we'll get to work on a bunch of your personal projects", which I've heard before. Its a game people play when they want to get stuff either cheap or for free. But I showed him P-4 and right off the bat he was wanting to change the shape of the mouth and most stupidly take off the plug to make it more "kid friendly".....it was then that I realized he didn't "get it" and would essentially be negating the point of the character. One day I hope to see him realized as an physical object, but in the meantime here's some drawings of him over the years as well as his female counter part - SC. I'll let you guess what that stands for.

Some variant paint schemes including a C-3PO version

Hot Wheels!

Another client from over the years - Hot Wheels / Mattel. From 2005-2012 I created graphics for various car segments including an actual monster truck called Bad News Travels Fast. I'm trying to remember the first official car I worked on as it seemed like a few were thrown at me at once, but I believe it was this one - a Scion XB for their Dropstars line....

Next up was this car for their Bone Blazers segment, the Rapid Transit

After that I worked on an entire segment called Spy Force, which consisted of 5 cars......

Over the years I did a bunch of odds and ends, including graphics for their 2007 Toy Fair car, 2007 Halloween Dream, All Stars line , Road Beasts, Clover Cars etc. Here's a little sampling of those....

This car is actually my favorite of all the cars I worked on, the 2007 All Stars Impala....They also did several other colorways of it, including a K-mart exclusive silver version and a really cool looking blue one....

Next up was a really cool project - redesigning the graphics for one of the Hot Wheels sponsored Monster Jam trucks - Bad News Travels Fast. I had a lot of fun on this one and it was surreal seeing it in person when Monster Jam rolled into town February of 2008.

It was released in various sizes including 1:64 and 1:24 scale as well as being featured in a Monster Jam XBOX 360 game

Here's a video of the actual truck in action.... Unfortunately or fortunately depending on how you view it, Bad News was sold to another owner and was redesigned again....:sad trombone: Oh well it's immortalized in die-cast cars.... Next I worked on a couple segments from Hot Wheels' pop culture series which are a little pricier and fitted with Real Rider rubber tires. First up was a series of cars inspired by Nose Art and Pin-ups. Here's a video showing all of them..... One that's kind of special about this bunch was the Dairy Delivery truck because I put a tribute to my Grandpa Goad who had passed away in 2006 on the side of it. It's military designation IG11261912 stands for Ivan Goad followed by his birthday ( Nov. 26, 1912 )

and then last but not least I worked on a segment of cars featuring Universal Monsters.... I would say my favorite is a toss-up between Frankenstein and The Mummy. They even had nice retail displays for them and I was able to snag one from the local Krogers. SCORE.

"Res Luk Ra'auf!"

People are probably very aware of my obsession with Star Wars. To me it's not necessarily about the movies, or the toys but about a great time in my life and a lot of my love for Star Wars is clamoring to get just a little taste of that. I still have my Darth Vader case full of all the figures I got as a kid and I would say for about 90% of them I can tell you a little story about the circumstances of which I got them - maybe even the time of year I got them and in some cases even the weather of that day. It's like I was so laser focused on my action figures that my brain took a little snapshot of everything going on around me. One figure I remember specifically getting was Bossk. For people not familiar with Star Wars lore, Bossk was a bounty hunter hired by Darth Vader along with Boba Fett, Zuckuss, IG-88, 4-LOM, and Dengar, to track down the Millenium Falcon and his occupants.

He was only shown on screen for a couple seconds, but I just remembered loving his design, especially the colors of his space suit. My memory involving me getting Bossk was that my mom, who was an occupational therapist went to Pittsburgh for some sort of seminar and we had to pick her up at the airport. Maybe I'm not remembering correctly the chain of events, but it literally felt like she got off the plane, opened up her yellow carry-all, and plunked good 'ole Bossk down in my hands, as if getting it to me was extremely important. I think this was actually even before the movie had come out so I really had no idea who he even was, but just remember thinking he was the greatest thing in the world (next to Boba Fett of course). I wonder how long it took me to rip him out of his package?

p.s. I just added an original watercolor painting I did of Bossk to my online store. Check it out.... Bossk original watercolor painting