The show!!

First off, I'd like to apologize for my lack of updates over the last few days, I've been a bit under the weather so to make up for it, I will not miss one day of updating over the next two weeks.

This is steve. He used to work for the electric company.

On to the updates!

The show!

The show is getting close, two weeks away! And there is tons left to be done, a possible book (if there is enough interest to cover the production costs), maybe a T-shirt ( see previous parenthetical statement), an extremely large amount of stop motion footage to edit down (seriously it's a ridiculous amount of footage), postcards to send out and leave in high traffic areas, and of course like 30 (drastic underestimate) more sculptures to make.

So the show is open to anyone and everyone and it will take place at Benji and Jakes on Sunday October 16th (starts around 2pm and goes until around 10pm)

If you would like to have a postcard, ya know, just to have one, send an e-mail to artbyzacmax@gmail.com with your address in it.

Snake and Crane Martial Arts

I know I said I was gonna write something, but I just finished working and I have to go shop and cook for a big meal tonight.

l'Shana Tova!

[Happy New Year!]

Not all monsters all evil.

The sister of yesterday sculpture is here to prove that not every monster is an aberration of unspeakable horror.

Myah.

[I apologize for the small diptych photo]

I've missed a couple days this past week...

So here's a very angry child.

(fly swatter as requested)

A little (Metal) Bundle of Joy

Back to what I was saying about the difficulty of the small sculptures, well nothing could illustrate that point more clearly than trying to sculpt a newborn baby... With these tiny heads I've come to learn that most of the fabrication process is skill, but there is definitely an element of luck mixed in and when I was sculpting this little guy I certainly felt like... It's a sculpture that truly made me proud.

Crazy Bat Woman and the return of Big Ed

So I failed to upload one photo a day... not only did I fail to upload a sculpture to my blog, but I didn't even create a single one... well I'd have to say that's partly due to the fact that I drove down to westchester to pick up this massive beast of a sculpture who was still hanging around at Purchase College and has been longing to be driven down the thruway with his feet sticking out the back of my friends Ford F250 so that he could oxidize in the glorious country air.

A difficult task.

So Yesterday turned out to be one of the most difficult days of the project so far. I was tasked with making a set of twins... a set of very small twins (as well as their parents). I was given a photo of the family together, but it was requested that all 4 sculptures be separate. So I added the challenge of getting them all to fit together as in the original photo and also be separate pieces. This task proved to be a moderate pain (getting the arms to match up), but nothing compared to trying to make the two little girls. On top of the fact that a child's face has a somewhat different anatomical structure than an adult face, I also had to make two that looked very alike, and do it on a small scale. You see the thing with metal is, as you may have learned through life experience, it's not very malleable; it's unforgiving. So to make these two faces on this tiny scale and working with tools that are more or less designed to work on bridges and building structures... well, it's difficult. In fact at one point I threw my hat on the ground and walked off shaking with aggravation for at that point I had rebuilt the faces nearly 10 times each. There was one instance where I had successfully built the nose and eyes of one of the faces and was welding on the upper lip, when a slight miscalculation in my welding led to complete ruination of the face and I had to grind it all off and start over again. So even though it seems like the smaller the project the quicker and easier it would go, often it's just the opposite. For me the greatest challenge truly is the smallest work, and that is partly why I took on this project, to challenge myself, to get good at doing the hardest project I could think of so that it will easily translate itself to the larger, slower, more deliberate work... and I must say I'm looking very forward to the next massive sculpture. Whew.

Ah yes.

Oh man, today was exhausting. I'll explain why tomorrow.

Meet the Metalsmiths*

I missed out on posting yesterday, so I figured I'd do a little extra today. Enjoy three new sculptures!

*Their last name is not actually Metalsmith, but it would have been really cool if it were.

Update: just so everyone knows the show is a month away! October 16th, mark your calendars! Also, if we arent friends already, add me on facebook ( Zac Shavrick ) to get the official event invite.

A Grizzly Bear with Chainsaws for arms

So since I was getting all this attention on Reddit, I decided to have a little fun and let the people of the Reddit community come up with my next sculpture. The winning idea was, naturally, a Grizzly Bear with Chainsaws for Arms, which received well over 400 votes (suggested by Reddit user Viralence).

If you want to see the original thread where the voting took place go here

And if you want to read what people are saying about the sculpture you can go here

Also I added some paypal buttons for the simple commission sculptures on the Buy a Sculpture page on my website

This is my favorite photo of the project

This girl, for at least a moment, truly believed she was a monster. So I hope I made that dream a reality.

Keep on Kickin

A very big thank you to Nicole He for writing a truly excellent blog post on the Kickstarter blog

Another wonderful thing about her article was she put the sculpture in the proper diptych format without me having to mess around on photoshop myself! So thanks again Nicole.

"[Nicole], a solemn metal ukuleleist"

Alright, now I must get back to work!

Woah!

Woah, so last night I was doing my usual round of (soulless) self promotion. Sending out a couple messages on facebook, twitter, and a quick Reddit post. When I notice that I'm getting a strange preponderance of messages and people asking for sculptures... all in a very short period of time. I thought maybe my Reddit post had taken off, as occasionally one is wont to do, but I noticed it had garnered like 1 comment and maybe 100 views (which seemed decent to me), not enough to cause a stir. Anyway a little while later I get a message from a friend on facebook, that I was on the front page of Reddit (a big deal). Turned out that he had compiled a bunch of the photos from the blogposts and thrown them up in the Imgur image hosting website and linked to it [ here ], with a much more adroit title, and it had already been receiving a ton of attention. So I spent most of last night trying to prove that I actually was the guy who made all those sculptures that the people were talking about, which felt a little like I was running around in my own art show yelling out "I'm the guy!" to a bunch of people who are like "who is this crazy person?"... which was an interesting dilemma, for the first couple hours. But eventually word spread that I was really me, and I was graced with a lot of new orders for sculptures, and it even caused me to rally my web-editing energy and build a new page on my website which gives simple instructions on how to purchase a sculpture [ here ].

I was notified today that some of the pictures in the album created by my friend received as many as 240,000 views... woah. That's pretty sweet! So I just wanted to shoot a big Thank You to my friend who posted my work on Reddit and to the whole Reddit community. That was really cool!

And here is a photo of a little monster I made 3 or 4 years ago, a sort of ancestor of the whole Kickstarter Project. Photo Courtesy of Alex Ogle

his name is Mojo.

Shark Boy

And then there was Shark-Boy.

I'll write something tomorrow.

This guy.

Jeremy, Andrew's Tricloptic Child

Andrew the Ever ready demon.

So I'm tryin out a new macro lens... still gettin the hang of it.

And just for fun here's a super close up of the maniacal giraffe I posted a couple days ago .:.

Sweet sweet detail .

Examiner and Re-Examiner.

The very sassy Kerri ( @NYfolkexaminer ) has made her first appearance in metal. Check out her excellent column on NY area folk art Here.

As I'm cresting the halfway point of this project I believe it's time to give a little recap as to what it's all about:

The Toys Are Us project was actually something I had conceived of many years ago but never had a chance to do. I had always wanted to create a room that you walk into that is just filled with little people and monsters , to make something massive out of lots of tiny things. A little world. I don't (generally speaking) like things that are too sparse or simple, so when I conceived of the idea I always wanted it to have hundreds of characters, so that when someone stepped into this environment it becomes truly overwhelming. But it was one of those projects that I never got around to accomplishing and always kept in the back of my mind. It occurred to me that peopling the project with creatures purely from my imagination would be a lot of fun, but it would be even cooler if I could get people to send me pictures off of which the sculptures would be based. And since I was making them in somewhat of a bulk fashion I could do it a cheaper than average cost... like a Groupon. So I figured I'd send my idea over to kickstarter, since I had heard so much about the website, and see how it fared. If it didn't generate the activity necessary than it would be no sweat of my back, and if it did... well, here I am. The project far exceed my expectation and left me with a crazy crazy work load. My cup runneth over. So I'm working every day, hoping to crank out an average of 3 sculptures a day until the show on October 15th. Some days I succeed some days I fall short. But seeing as the masses of little sculptures are ever encroaching on my areas of personal space, the future looks bright for a seething mob of miniature humans and monsters.

And who knows, there may even be a companion book to go along with the project.....

Two for Tuesday: Zack Doyle and The Cycloptic Slugger

This young fellow here has been depicted both as a human and a monster and he faces off against himself in a game of baseball.

It may be noted that though this battle seems epic, it is far from it. Due to the monocular nature of the monster he lacks any real depth perception and the chances of him actually connecting on even a moderate fastball is, well, highly unlikely.

The Monsterification of Michael and the Giraffifacation of a Camel

As per request the camel pictured was transformed into a maniacal giraffe. Hence the Giraffifacation of the Camel.

Keith Vs Keith

Okay. I missed out on posting a sculpture yesterday, so in order to get myself back on track I've uploaded two sculptures today.

The following dialogue was overheard:

Human: Oh my god a Monster!

Monster: Aaaah a Human!

Human: Please don't eat me!

Monster: Please don't expose me to reality television!

Human: You're not going to eat me are you?

Monster: What? No.

Human: Please, please don't eat me!

Monster: Stop saying that. Why would I eat you?

Human: I... I thought that's what monsters did...

Monster: No I just came over cause I saw you were wearing the same vest as me.

Human: Oh, I guess we are wearing the same vest.... Well, why did you scream than?

Monster: You screamed, so I screamed. I always scream when someone else screams....[quietly: for ice cream ]

Human: Oh. Okay than.

Monster: Hey is that a Nikon D-70...

Human: um... yeah.. is that a Nikon D-70?

Monster: Yeah! Wow! Crazy! I mean the same vest and the same camera!? What are the chances of that?!

Human: I dunno... I mean yeah, wow.

Monster: Oh hey, did you take my picture?

Human: Um... yeah, I did. Is that okay?

Monster: Yeah, no, not really. I mean I can't go around being caught on camera... It's just..

Human: Oh, okay. No problem I'll just delete it.

Monster: I dunno, I'm not sure if I can trust you... I mean we do have the same vest and the same camera, which is pretty sweet and all... but you still are human

Human: Here you can watch me delete it if you like.

Monster: I dunno, you humans are so cunning. If I let that picture get out, than I'll end up all over the news, and one thing leads to the next I'll have a book deal and I'll get offered boatloads of money be part of a reality TV show. It's easy to say I would turn it down now, but I mean the money isn't right in front me, I mean it's hard to say no to that kind of cash and I'll probably buckle and give in.... and so then I'll just be part of the problem. I really don't want that.

Human:Well..... Here. Take my camera.

Monster: ....You know, I am kinda hungry now that I think about it... I think I'm gonna have to eat you. You understand right? no hard feelings about this.

The more hands the merrier.

The Handyman:

Bucket Headed

One of today's creations. The inimitable Bucket Head. Ordered by, presumably, a fan of Bucket Head.