I consider myself more of an artisan than an artist. When I make something, function and ease of use are as important as appearance. I see my skills as laying closer to the decorative arts than the fine arts.
My product range focuses on EasyPose, an ERC based posing system I invented to make it easy to pose long, thin, flexible figures such as tentacles and chains.BIOMy Background:
I'm an Australian mathematician with some amateur skills in programming. I love working with my hands and I've been making things since I was old enough to pick up a pair of scissors and some cardboard. I've worked a lot with silver, leather and wood among other materials. I've even done some sewing and embroidery.
How EasyPose was invented:
I bought Poser because it looked like a good way to make 2D animated sprites for a little computer game I wanted to write, but once I started to see what Poser could do, I lost interest in the game and started making pictures.
As a newbie I spent a lot of time downloading free stuff. I have a very slow dialup connection so while the free stuff was downloading, I passed the time reading tutorials. One day I read Nerd's ERC tutorial and if I'd been in a comic, you would have seen a light bulb flash on above my head. The idea behind EasyPose is really pretty simple and it came into my head complete and ready to go. I "just" had to check whether ERC would really do what I needed it to. The devil was in the detail.
At exactly the same time Beyond Bent had a competition running where you could win one of Davo's CDs, which I desperately wanted to do. The theme was "tentacle attack" and a tentacle seemed like a great figure to try out my posing system, so I had the idea and the motivation both at the same time. I spent two weeks of very, very late nights getting the first, short, clunky EasyPose figure to work and used it to make a picture which took first place in the competition. That was the start of EasyPose and also the start of a very productive friendship with Davo.
That was March 2001. There were a lot of problems with the EasyPose prototype and it took about four months before the first EasyPose figure was ready to be released. I estimate something like 600 hours went into bringing EasyPose to the stage where I could make the tentacle I sell today.
It has been a lot of work, but it has been well worth it to see the reactions from people the first time they use one of my figures. I get a real buzz out of that and I still sometimes get that same feeling of wonder when I use the figures myself.
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Comments (6)
Jack D. Kammerer
Very, very classic and excellent work Ajax!! It captures and displays the kind feel of Frazetta or the Hilderbrandt Brothers. Great work!!
archetype
I see a couple of things worth noting (please bear with me.) First, the skin texture looks like its from a photo and the lighting on the chest is off. The lighting on the face looks entirely different. The gun/pants look exquisitely drawn, but that contrasts with the photo realism of his skin texture. The scene has a good composition and the figure is well posed (nice expression too!) I think a few touchups can bring out that drama you were looking for. I hope you dont mind the crit, and I want to make sure you know I like this image. Good job!
Grendel
Nice idea. I like the concept. I tend to agree with archetype about the apparent differences in texture styles. For some reason the character's head doesn't look quite right within the context of this picture, partly the lighting and partly something I can't put my finger on. It's not far from being a really good pic though.
dirk5027
actually the pic is very very cool, i knew immediately it was the raven texture, it's not your lighting raven has white on his upper chest, i have tried blending it out, but that doesn't work well either, he's a killer texture otherwise, all in all this pic is great
scifiguy
Try adjusting the lighting making the foreground darker with more spot lighting on the tentacles to heighten the "look out" effect from the audiance perspective.
SevenOfEleven
Lighting needs to be a bit darker for a creepier feel. Gun looks great.