Wheel of Time Action Figures Part 5: To Make A Trolloc

Hi kids, welcome back! I hope everyone had a fun and festive holiday season and that 2011 is treating you all well so far. I have a late Christmas present for all of you, another entry in my custom Wheel of Time Action Figures series - a special one this time! As I alluded to a few weeks ago, I was going to devote some of my free time during last week's mini-vacation to creating a new Wheel of Time figure and also try to do some sort of "making of" feature along with it, possibly in real time here on the blog. Now I had taken the week between Christmas and New Years off anyway, but the free time I ended up having during my "mini vacation" was greatly multiplied by New York City being buried under a metric shit-ton of snow; our wonderful Dept. of Sanitation leaving us that way for two or three days for whatever reason, and the fact that at the slightest hint of inclement road conditions, Joey's Beemer only drives sideways.

Also, I'm not quite sure how I expected to do a blog post in real time, but regardless, the post is here now. I know I also said I would be doing the "aborted and abandoned figures" article first, but I decided I'd do this one instead. If this bothers you, what can I tell you, deal with it.  Oh, and if you're new here, you can check out the previous articles here, here, here and here.

So yeah thanks to the snow I ended up with even more free time than I planned on having last week, and despite Santa bringing me a whole bunch of new books and DVD's I managed to pry myself away from my Christmas presents long enough to create a brand spanking new Trolloc figure. Actually I pried myself away long enough for two marathon sessions of painting and sculpting on Tuesday and Wednesday respectively; from 10pm to 4am-ish both nights. And I guess I didn't really pry myself away either, the first night during the sculpting I finished off The Simpsons Season 13 (which was much better than I remember it being) and Flash Gordon (which was fucking ABYSSMAL... I mean really, what the hell was that?). The second night during the painting it was all Star Wars: The Clone Wars Season 1, which I have to admit is a surprsingly excellent little show, despite being based on the... ugh, prequels. Why you care what I was watching while I created this figure, I'm not quite sure, but I'm just trying to give you all the total experience of what went into this toy's creation process. Wait, should I tell you what I was wearing too?

Wheel of Time Action Figures Part 2: Mat Cauthon and Perrin Aybara

Hey kids, I'm back with part two of my custom Wheel of Time Action Figures article. Sorry it took so long between installments. Truth be told I didn't mean to make you wait quite this long, but I was just too lazy to take new pics. I photographed all of them tonight though, so it won't take me quite so long to get parts three and four done (unless I get too lazy to write, in which case you're all screwed).

Anyway, before I show you Mat and Perrin I have a little bit to add to the origin story from Part One. Now aside from all the stuff I discussed last time, I had an additional motivation going into the creation of the figures, that being that in 1998 as far as I was concerned there still hadn't been any accurate visual depictions of the characters as they're described in the books. I was reluctant to mention this at first because not only is it kind of arrogant of me to think I could do a better job than professionals (and we all know I'm only ever arrogant about my looks, intelligence, sexual prowess and general comparative stock as a better human being than most people, I NEVER brag about my artistic ability), but also because its kind of insulting to said professionals. But then I said fuck it, the Guide didn't quickly become known as "the big book of bad art" on the newsgroup for no reason, and complaining about Darrell Sweet's covers is tired and cliche at this point. So yeah, I figured my attempts couldn't be any worse than what was already out there, and honestly, I think the end results are better than the covers or anything in guide. And I say that with all humility. Now that that's out of the way, on to Mat and Perrin.

Wheel of Time Action Figures Part 1: Rand Al'Thor

Ok, so way back in 1998 I did something REAL geeky. Now I'm not saying that's a bad thing, it isn't, but before I tell you what it is I did (and if your deductive reasoning skills have recently been featured on failblog and you haven't figured it out yet), I just want to put this whole situation in perspective a little bit... because it was sort of a perfect storm of circumstances that lead to me having the time and the inspiration to do this.

OK, so as some of you know, back in the 9-8 I was entangled firmly in the rut that was my horrendous dead end relationship (with a whole two years to go!). My daily routine at that time consisted of taking the A train to NYU, getting class over with, and rushing back home as soon as humanly possible to enjoy the few hours of girlfriendless peace and quiet I had before she would get home from school or work and find some way to completely wreck my day ("completely wrecking my day" consisted of anything from asking me to do something I likely didn't want to do, to speaking to me, to just being within my general vicinity for several consecutive seconds... do you get the point yet? I didn't like her). Now, given that the majority of my life was a confusing, unhappy quagmire I needed to have several avenues of escapism just to maintain the state of casual, loosely-defined sanity that I usually exist in. Among those were obsessively watching pro wrestling, making weekly trips to the comic book store and Toys R Us, a new found fascination with hip-hop, and of course, reading nerdy fantasy novels.