Drab Future toy production

Its been a long road, from prototypes to molds/casting/assembly and painting, but I’m proud to announce that the new Drab future toys will be available through the Zerofriends web store this Friday, (Tomorrow!) and I can’t wait to see what everyone does with theirs.

I’d hoped to do a full write-up including tutorial videos for each step of the process, but sadly my phone was stolen before I could unload all the material I’d been recording. Fortunately I did manage to document a lot of the process and am able to share that with you now.

I created prototypes for each of the seven characters in Drab Future. These began as kit-bashed models based from various toys, won from skee-ball games, purchased from grocery stores and randomly aquired.

For each I sculpted their costumes over top the base model, and built accessories to show all the details.

For John Henry I began with a firefighter toy which was a skeeball prize, won from a local arcade.

needed to completely resculpt the face and mask, and add the straps and elements of his space suit.

I spent hours sourcing the best parts to match the character’s costumes and props.

I looked awhile for the a good way to mimic the texture of Casey Jones’ ghillie suit, who also began as a skee-bll prize firefighter, and eventually I settled on using gauze, treated with wax and liguid sculpy, and resculpted with a soldering iron.

When it was time to make the molds I produced elaborate vent/sprues to direct the flow of resin and prevent air bubbles.

I used around three gallons of silicone for the full set of molds.

Most of the prototypes did not survive the demolding process.

One of the most exciting stages was seeing all the molds set up and preparing to pour resin for the first casts.

Two gallons of resin later I had an army of raw castings.

Next came clean-up, each toy needed a bit of time with the dremel and x-acto to have it’s sprue and flashing removed. I decided to leave the slight imperfections such as air-bubbles as a mark of their creation, a bit of character to each one.

Then primer for basecoats

Weathering and washes of powdered pigment

And a bit of hand-painting

The finished set

Zerofriends Store