Final Outcome

Primary Images

To prove that I feel that moving into Toy making, here I have two basic toys that I made a year ago in my spare time out of old pencil cases and bags, as a mark of celebration for leaving high school, as it gave me the opportunity to rip up and reuse some of the equipment that annoyed me at school. The one on the right was made first and you can see on the one on the left that the design is not as roughly cut.

These are an interesting and different example of how toy designs can vary in look, shape and material. The Typography creates an interesting and unique element with an urban style which would appeal to young adults, not just children. This photo was taken in Kingston.

A bear made out of packaging tissue, cardboard and sellotape, this is an example of how a toy can be made out of reusable material.

Experimentation

To keep this project close to StarKid which was featured in my last project, I decided to sort through each toy or puppet that they have made for their main musical shows, allowing for me to pick the best few to look at make with my own design.

To play with these designs, I have taken a few of the puppets and made them into the letters StarKid using chalk pastels. The smudging of the pastels gives them a furry look, accenting their purposes as toys. As puppets, they all have a distinctive look and colour, which links to the target audience of the musicals; children to young adults. 

Moving away from the StarKid design, I tried to create my own look and favourite style of toy, so it took the shape of the Summer Sun-set Cavey, which is evident in its shape and design, though maybe a little too much. To distinguish it, I used Live Trace and Paint to create an effect that looks a little out of control! I painted it with an abstract brush to give it a whisky, furry look.

To tone down the 'out of control' look, I made a simple mouse design that would be made out of cloth. It is a mouse because of the recycled materials it would be made out of, and I imagine mice running around a dump full of old, thrown out materials. To link to my previous project the background is a primary piece in my outcome, which should have been the design on the toy but it was a challenge as some of the lines made in the Live Trace and design were too thin.

Fabric crayon proved to be interesting and enjoyable to use in designing, though difficult to get the right effect. As it came out weaker than what I hoped, I learnt that the best colours to use are darker blues and purple. Here I test out an idea for the brand name. The name comes from StarKid, though I thought that it would be better if I changed the logo from the previous project.

Here I test out colour on fabric using different mediums without using fabric dye. First we have ink, which helped prove my belief that blue and purple looked pleasing on that colour of fabric. To spread the ink out and to help colours blend into others, I applied water. The lighter the colours looked the better, but I didn't want them too dark or people wouldn't be able to see them.

This piece also made with ink, showed me it was best not mix fairly contrasting colour groups. I wanted to spell out 'STAR' all in a yellow, though I saw that the white background would be hard to see it on, especially if all the yellow words were pressed together so you couldn't distinguish them, so I tried to change the order with what I thought was black but it turned out to be dark blue. However I saw that yellow and orange worked well, but darker colours looked too dirty in comparison to lighter colours.

Here I tried to look at darker colors with acrylic paint. The blues work the best against the white. In this example, the black and green did not work as well and more unpleasant to the eye as the black looked too dirty and as the green was darker, became too dirty for my tastes as well, but the dark blue worked well with the lighter blue.

To look at lighter colours, I used water-colours in shades of blue and purple as they looked best combined together. The colours came out well, though in places a little dull. The white patches were supposed to symbolize stars as the theme of my last project was space, though it contradicts the uniqueness of the 'i' in this version of the logo and brand name.  

Moving on from paint to pens, I once again tried to find the best colour amongst felt tip pens. They all came out at a good balance, making quite interesting rainbow colours, however a few colours mixed in with others that wasn't aesthetically pleasing and though parts looked dirty it looks overall in the various shades of blue and the yellows.

Green shirt dyed blue with string markings

Dark Checked Shirt

Dyed Linen sheet with rubber band mark

Now it was time to do it with the real thing: dyeing fabric. I chose a medium ocean blue as it wouldn't be too light or too dark and what I liked was that it also created shades of purple as well, especially in the second material as it had dark checked design. I chose these materials as they were past there useful stage: the first two are old shirts and the last was a linen cloth I picked up in Oxfam so they are all recycled materials in a way. To experiment with their colour, I tied a rubber around the linen sheet then tied string around the previously green shirt to see how the results would vary between the two. As shown they came out very different as the sheet came out with a circle pattern though not very clear and the shirt had a strange, abstract, wispy yet beautiful circle that was not straight at all. Parts of the old green design were showing through that reminded me of one of the art pieces for my previous project outcome. 

Let's not forget about the eyes of a toy which are in usual cases the most important part of a toy as can add to what makes the toy unique. Here I have examples that I was thinking of in making the Bug toy: a bottle cap sewn onto the fabric (this proved to be too impractical as bottle caps are too large in size and sewing them takes a lot of time), wobbly eyes which I tested for their size (though these were too low quality and lacked professionalism) and cut pieces of plastic in the shape of two round eyes, which I used for the Bug doll as they had a resemblance to Bug's eyes. 

Stop motion animation

This is a quick experiment I made while creating my own version of the Bug toy for the StarKid musical 'Starship'. Here you will see me actually make the toy through stop motion animation, though in the video I have the toy filling do it by pushing all the parts into place. The idea is that they found all these parts which are made out of old materials which have been lying around: for the head it's an old towel, the left arm is coloured tissue, the right arm is crepe paper, the left leg is paper, cardboard, rubber-bands and netting, the right leg is some old cotton material and the torso is some netting left over from Christmas. The eyes and feelers are pieces of plastic and coloured pipe-cleaners. The song 'I Wanna Be' from 'Starship' is played over this as this is the song Bug sings when he aspires to be something more than what he is and I feel that this is appropiate in this situation as well as he is essentially a pile of rubbish in the form of a red ant, but that doesn't mean he can't be lovable.