Goo-Ers Toys Booklet

I designed Goo-Ers Toys booklet so people can get to know more about my toy characters as well as the process of making them. I designed and created everything in the booklet myself. From sketches, tracing, coloring, layout, background, everything…

Here are the pages of my Goo-Ers Toys booklet (click thumbnails to enlarge):

Goo-Ers Toys Part 3 – The Packaging

Now that the toys are done, I had to start working on the packaging.  My professor suggested that we buy toy, then use the box as the template of our toy’s box. I went to toy box hunting at Disney store and Wall-Mart, and decided to buy an Elvis sound speaker toy with a nice box.  The box had many areas for me to design, big plastic area so people can see the toys inside the box, and the box was quite big, which I was sure would fit four of my toys.

I used Adobe Photoshop to design the packaging.  At the front of the box, I decided to put just the name of the toys. I didn’t put any pictures of the toys or characters there because I thought it would distract people’s attention from the real toys which are displayed behind the plastic at the front.  BTW, I decided to name my characters “Goo-Ers” at this stage.

On the left side of the box, I put information about me as the creator and designer of the toys, as well as my illustrator drawing of the characters and my website.  On the right side, I put information about the toys, picture of the characters and also the link to my website.  At the back side, I put the story about the toys, characteristic of each toy, barcode, as well as link to the toys website.

After I finished designing each side of the packaging, I printed them all, and then the cutting and gluing process begin!  Cutting those papers and glued them to the real box took lots of works.  I was so relieved and happy when the box was ready.

Here are photos of the packaging (click thumbnails to enlarge):

Last step is to arrange how to fit all four toys in the box and still look good.  It turned out that I didn’t measure my box perfectly, and as a result, the box is kind of too crowded for all four toys.  I didn’t want to left out one of my toys, as I put lots of efforts creating each of them.  I was thinking and thinking….and then I came up with idea to add ‘a stair’ in the box, which means 2 toys at the front, and 2 toys on the stair at the back of the box.

I made holes on the cardboxes, used strings to tie the feet of my toys, and then attached them to the cardboxes.  It took me 2-3 hours or maybe longer just to put those toys inside the box and made sure they stand still in their position.  I am satisfied and proud with the result…my hard work paid off.

Photos of final product (click thumbnails to enlarge):

This whole Goo-Ers Toys project started in February 2008 and completed in April 2008.

Goo-Ers Toys Part 2 – Making the Toys

After all sketching and color scheme jobs is done (see previous post), now it’s time to make the toys.  The material I used to make my toys was Super Sculpey.  I shaped each toy one by one, and once I’m done with that, I put them all in the oven to make them hard.

After I took out the toys from the oven, I just let them aired and cooler overnight before I started painting.  Painting the toys were more frustrating than I expected it to be. I had to paint some surface, wait a while, then paint the exact same surface again and again to make the color visible.  And then body parts of my toys started falling off, because apparently I didn’t put enough wires to connect the head, ears, arms, etc.  I needed to glue some ‘falling’ body parts so many times, which is frustrating.  Also, sometimes when I cleared some areas which had glues on them, the paint came off and I had to re-painted.  It took me two days just to finish the painting process.

Below are some pictures I took when some body parts fell off, some pictures from the painting process, and also picture of my glue-gun, which I used to glue back falling pieces (click thumbnails to enlarge).

The next step to do after the painting is done is to spray the toys with Krylon, which would make the paint on the toys lasts longer, as well as making it glossy.   Krylon had strong smell that I couldn’t stand, and the lid is kind of hard to open. Anyway, I sprayed my toys with Krylon, waited until it’s fully dry (like 3 hours), and then sprayed it again for the last time.  The result is amazing!   My toys looked super glossy!  <3

Here are how they looked after they’re being sprayed and fully dry.  The pictures didn’t turn out that nice, but trust me, these toys look better in reality than they are in photos (click on thumbnails to enlarge).

To be continue in “Goo-Ers Toys Part 3 – The Packaging”…

Goo-Ers Toys Part 1 – Ideas and Sketches

As one of the two final projects for my Sketching for Communication course that I took in first semester, I had to create an original character, which later on being turned into a toy.  I was kind of confused and had no ideas on what characters I wanted to create.  I didn’t want to spend too much time thinking without doing anything, so I just grabbed my pencil and sketchbook, then started drawing my dogs.

I named my dogs characters based on my dogs’ real name. They even have the same characteristics as my dogs! After drawing the dogs, my creative mood suddenly appeared…so I drew some more sketches for this toy project.  Below are my sketches (click thumbnails to enlarge):

I showed my sketches to my professor and asked him for his thoughts.  He liked my sketches and said I could do either the dogs or any of those little round characters I drew.  I was thinking for a while before deciding to do the little round things for this project.  At that point, my characters still had no name, and I called them as “little rounds”.

The next thing I did was re-draw my “little rounds” and gave each character a name and personality as follow (click on thumbnails to enlarge):

Angelina – The Feminine

Angelina is feminine and beautiful.  She loves flowers, sugar, chocolates and everything nice. She’s a happy go lucky type of girl.  I got her name from Angelina Jolie.  If you notice, Angelina has thick lips.

Betty – The Nurse

Betty is loving and caring. Her ambition is to make the world a better place. She believes that one day, there will be a world peace. I was inspired by Betty from “Betty & Veronica” when I created this character.

Jordan – The Geek

Jordan is a total geek. He wears glasses, has no expression, and spends most of his time studying or reading books. I like geeks and thought it would be cool to have a geek character.

Max – The Music Lover

Max loves music so much, and it can be seen from his earphones and music symbol on his shirt. He likes hanging out with friends and going out for fun. His name was inspired from Christina Aguilera’s first son, Max Bratman.

Here are the characters’ sketches from front, side, and back, as well as the color scheme that I decided to use for the toy-to-be (click thumbnails to enlarge):

to be continue in “Goo-Ers Toys Part 2 – Making the Toys”…