For the last few months I’ve been working on a few new toy projects to follow up the tremendous fun I had with Zog. But with Zog being the first toy for both me and Strangekiss, we didn’t do any accessories and focused mainly on the figure itself and learning the production process and it’s various steps. To one-up myself a bit, I’m hoping to have multiple toys out this year (both with accessories) and first of them will be Bill the Yeti from the drawing King of the Castle.

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Zog has been busy carving out some masks to celebrate Plastic and Plush’s nomination for best toy of 2008. There are some premade masks as well as templates to draw your own (and if you come up with a good one, I’d love to see it!). Download the masks here.

I have a couple of prints left after SDCC of the drawing I created for the Zog toy launch. If you’re interested, you can grab one here.

Today at noon (PST) pre-orders for Zog toys should go live at StrangeKiss for the regular purple edition for $79.95 and the Kozik bloody colorway for $99.95. If you are attending SDCC this year, we have a small shipment that we flew in and we’ll be raffling off 5 per day so make sure to come by to pick up a ticket for your chance to purchase one. The web pre-orders should start coming in within a few weeks since they’re being shipped by boat from the factory.

The production line is in full force and the first toy shipments of Zog and the Murder Zog variant by Kozik are on their way here for a late July release during SDCC. I’ll have more specific details as it gets closer, but you can get some more specs and information at Strangekiss where they will be available for purchase online in a few weeks.

Things are getting close now, it looks like we are on schedule and just hit the wax mold stage of production.

The wax model will be used to produce the production molds that the vinyl will be injected into.  So we’re getting very close to having a final product!

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I wasn’t entirely sure how translating my drawings into a vinyl toy would work out, but I knew it would be fun. At the same time, I didn’t want to get my hopes up too much just in case.

Now I can definitely say that I haven’t been this excited since Christmas morning when I was little. I could barely sit down for a few hours after I saw how the sculpting was coming along! They hit it spot on and I doubt there will be too many tweaks needed at all, although it’s still a bit weird to see something you’ve made cross from 2d to 3d.

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You may be familiar with one of my characters named Zog, if not by name, then definitely by sight. He’s the big purple guy from the first Somatic icons, and he can often be spotted sleeping on a grassy hill, or hunting marshmallows.

Thanks to the insanely huge help of Strangekiss, Zog has started his journey to become more than just a drawing. In not too long, you’ll be able to hold his rotocast vinyl body in your hands and chase your own marshmallows around the floor. So, to celebrate this great news, I’ve put together a sneak peek of concepts and production art to share.

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