I drew Stud and the other Ante Ups figures way back in 2008. I modeled the bodies digitally in Rhino. I made some large resin figures back then, but never sold them. I decided to develop 10-Doh! and So Analog 1st, so these guys took a back seat for a long time.
In 2013 I finally got around to reworking Stud, Craps, and Short Stack. Mana Studios and I produced 10 Preview sets of all 3 figures for Dcon 2013. The wonderful folks at Designer Con also let me do the artwork for that years program. I took that opportunity to "officially" announce Ante ups.
A big project fell through earlier this year, so I decided to finally make Stud happen. At the top are some of the comments I made about the Engineering Model from the factory. I made some other comments using my Rhino file as reference. This figure had a very quick turn around time, probably too quick.
Manufacturing is very expensive, so I try to divide up the large MOQ (Minimum Order Quantity) into smaller amounts by using different colors. Soooooo, that means you'll be seeing these other colored backs at some point soon.
This is one of the 1st mockups I sent to the factory to get a cost estimate. They mainly need to figure out how much the deco would cost, but I also wanted to make a Comic Con exclusive that tied into comics in some way. The SDCC version ended up having more colors and a more complex design. Of course, that means it ended up being more expensive.
It didn't take too long before I thought about doing a Joker card that used The Joker colors. A white Squib worked as the white face, and used red splatter to represent the grin. Then, I used green and purple splatters to hint at the hair color and suit color. This shows the progression of the art from sketchbook, scan, print, clean up, oops forgot details, vector, to full color. Am I efficient? Probably not.
I had originally planned to use this Joker card in the real deck of playing cards. Unfortunately, once I finished all of the art for the deck, this art didn't match very well. So, I designed new Jokers for the playing cards. It just makes this guy even more exclusive to SDCC. Right?
I originally showed this guy off online, just to see if people would like it. I wasn't even sure if I could get it done in time. The response was positive, so I got busy trying to make it happen. The factory did a great job, even with a couple bumps along the way. I had to call in a couple of favors to get them shipped in time, but they arrived safely. I still can't believe it. Ha.
It feels great to finally get another figure out there, other than a new version of 10-Doh!. Now, people just need to buy them, Ha. They'll only be 20 bucks at our booth #5051 at San Diego Comic Con July 8th-12th. I hope they sell out, because SDCC is crazy expensive and it would be nice to actually make it worth our time. I'll put any extras up on http://squidkidsink.bigcartel.com after the con.
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