I’ve been drawing characters for as long as I can remember, and more often than I’d imagine my drawing skills are always needed for product design projects whether for error, success, 404-like pages, personalized loaders, and waiting screens.

Even though the abbility of getting illustrations done is pretty handy, I always thought that I could do more and maybe explore more of my art skills. Back in 2020, I made a few stickers and shared them with coworkers, and it was awesome to see the workplace filled with my art.

That was pretty cool and all, but there was this one specific character that I liked so much, and I knew I could make more use of him. The character was the Light-bulb like Robot with boxing gloves.

It's hard to explain why some characteristics make us interested in a character, animal, object, or whatsoever. The light bulb character had the undercover meaning of a walking idea, the fusion between two things that are essentially contrasting, and that for sure draws people's attention.

Because of that, the nonsense of having a light bulb character boxing was so funny to me and a fellow friend that we decided to start an NFT out of the character. Back then we didn’t have a clear notion of how a mission and a purpose are really important for an NFT collection, all we wanted to do was spread the character the further we could get. As you could expect, the project went nowhere, and we stopped working at the moment we set a name for the collection (Flashy Bots), and finished designing the new and improved character, with different light bulbs as heads, accessories, and more important a turnaround.

A turnaround is a way of having a character from different angles to serve as a visual reference, and doesn’t have to be animated (but making additional frames to have a 2D character work on a 3D ambient is pretty cool). A side, front and back view can get the job done, but having a 3/4 pose helps a lot while displaying proportions and understanding the overall volume.

At the time that it was drawn the character turnaround was meant to maintain consistency to remind me of proportions in case I’d change the character’s pose for the actual NFT. But turns out that it helped immensely a little over a year later, with an idea that would have better use of all those angles.

Since the NFT project didn’t go past some basic definitions and character design I had all the character designs ready, and no use for them.

Around the end of 2022, out of nowhere one of my favorite YouTube Artists, TenHun, started a Toy Art project based on a pretty cool character of his. From that moment on I decided to create a Prototype Toy out of the light-bulb robot I liked so much with the end goal of challenging myself for two weeks.

Since I didn’t have time to waste and little experience sculpting 3D characters, I opted to have a 3D artist make an awesome sculpture of the body of my character, and that’s where the turnaround was pretty useful. The sculpture wouldn’t include the lightbulb itself, since having lightbulbs printed demand printers I didn’t have easy access to, for that reason, I’d use real lightbulbs.

This decision didn't affect the work at this point, but later on you can see how a decision made on the inicial steps of the project could affect the whole making of the Toy.

Normally once you have whatever you are 3D printing effectively printed you have to sand it to clean up the big lines that support the model, which takes a lot of time. Knowing that I had just a few more days to finish the project I opted for an alternative that didn’t require any sanding, and had the model printed in a Resin 3D printer that would give me an almost ready-to-use and smooth character.

It didn’t take long to have it printed and shipped, but once I tried to assemble the lightbulb to the body I found out I messed out the connecting points of the Light Bulbs to their bodies, something about the head fit wasn’t working out, and I'd have to dismantle the light bulbs to get the faces where they should be. I decided to keep the prototype simple, which meant that the first version wouldn’t light up :(

Toy packaging is an art form that often goes unnoticed that can be a deciding factor to ultimately have someone buy your toy over another cool figure. Even though it wasn’t the case for my project since I was just trying to challenge myself and profit meant finishing the figure on time, I thought that having the pack mirror the prototype effect the whole project had was a good idea to start with.

Sometimes things don’t go as we planned, and all of a sudden we have to adapt or even start over to finish our projects and reach personal goals. Well, life imitates art, and in one-second things can change drastically. I dropped the miniature right after I attached the lightbulb to the body, and wasn’t able to save any of it. To get things worst I had only one more chance to start over and finish the project in time. Well, nonetheless to say I worked even harder, with much more care, and made the Flashy Bot once again!

The main idea of ​​the project was to challenge me to bring the intangible to reality through a Toy Art prototype. The cool thing about this is to look back and think about what we learned to get things done.

Of course, there were a lot of challenges and situations where I didn't have the answers to questions that would guide me to achieve the goals previously set. But getting the best of the prototype just right made me learn a lot about things I didn't even think about in the first place.

The journey of discovering the right way of solving each little step involved a lot of trial and error and hours of research, but it paid off since now I'm able to say that I've found a way of making Toy Art.

The project was born out of the love I had for the character even as a Sticker, and even though the idea of ​​trying to achieve something with NFTs ended up going nowhere, since the Toy Art challenge, I had the opportunity of working with things I have never put my finger at in first place.

I ended up finishing it on time, and I’m already working on improvements for the next version. I’m very excited to see where the future will take the Flashy Bots.