Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

As you may recall, Nefarious created a character called “Tippy Pig”, on account of his difficult centre of gravity resulting from an oversized head. A silicone mold was taken and plastic clones were made. So now we have a dozen new toys to play with. Here’s a “class photo”, and you can see them all in detail after the break. As I mentioned, they’re plastic, and the modifications were done with Apoxie Clay (a two-part self-hardening polymer clay) and then painted with Vallejo acrylics and given a gloss coat over that to protect them.

Go ahead and click on the pictures to view them all nice and huge.

The base toy was sculpted by Nefarious and all the sculptural changes via Apoxie Clay were done by me, although in most of them it was Nefarious’s idea — she would sketch the modifications on paper and I’d follow her directions. Painting is by me unless specified otherwise (the gypsy fortune teller pig is by Caitlin, and the boar is by Nefarious). Making these has been a lot of fun.

Could it be Dr. Tippy? Medi-Pig, the doctor.

The Commander, the pig who is actually second in command.

Horse Pig. He has a saddle on him and generally gets ridden by the little pig that follows below.

Little Rider Pig. He’s actually a one-off sculpture rather than a cast plastic toy. He’s quite tiny, less than an inch high, and was tricky to make.

Ghost Pig. This is actually cast in a soft foam, unlike all the rest which are done in hard plastic.

Buttless Pig. He was injured by an air bubble. He’s also one of the first ones molded and has the additional problem of having tons of mini-bubbles on his scalp from a reaction to the mold release that I didn’t let fully dry.

I suppose you could say that this is Tippy Pig. I think it’s the first one to come out of the mold and has not been modified and has no errors other than the small bubbles from the mold release mistake.

Sir Tippy Pig. He’s a knight.

Pigasus is half tippy pig and half red dragon.

A statue (an idol?) to Lord Tippy Pig. This is actually not a cast — this is what I did with the original Sculpey master after pulling a silicone mold off of it. It’s painted with a mix of gold and copper paint.

The General. As you may have assumed, Nefarious painted it, and I did the conversion to a fat boar in a hat and with a heart tattoo. I think she decided he was a general because of the hat.

Gypsy Fortune-Teller Pig. This one is Caitlin’s creation, who both painted it and created the hair prosthesis (out of an old wig) and the accessories.

This was a very fun family project. That said, it takes much longer to paint these guys than you’d think, so it is also kind of nice to be done. At least one night I actually fell asleep with a brush in my hand… Although falling asleep in the middle of something has happened a lot lately. I prefer it to lying down to sleep, because when I do that, my mind invariably drifts to the way my muscles feel and I end up getting trapped in that unpleasant space, and when I finally do drift off it’s an uneven sleep that I wake from in pain. But when I drop dead from exhaustion, I seem to sleep quite solidly and there’s almost a pleasure in it. The pleasure of oblivion I suppose.

That said, I do have the creeping paranoia that if I don’t start putting in more sleep hours that I’m going to wake up into some psychedelic Vanilla Sky-esque nightmare world. So perhaps next week I will do lots of sleeping in — this week I’ve had to get up at 6 AM every day to get Nefarious to the bus that takes her to the ski resort (which has turned out to be a super fun March Break activity, and I’m sure she’s an awesome and confident downhill skier now).