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.
