Autumn Owl Custom Munny, Painting and Print
‘Autumn Owl — Munny’
As the icy fingers of December close their shivering embrace upon us one may catch themselves assuming that we are lost to another long winter. Well, I say not. As the calendar has it, winter doesn’t begin this year until the 22nd and as of the moment it is only the 18th.
Do you know what that means? It’s Autumn. Oh, yes Autumn. And here in Cleveland this is our season. The leaves change colors, the squirrels plump up, dark ales taste better and sweater seasons means we eat Melt Bar and Grilled five nights a week without compunction.
Joy.
‘Autumn Owl’
In honor of this wondrous season, and the second annual custom Munny show hosted by Vivid Plastic Toys, I hereby incarnate ‘Autumn Owl.”
This year Vivid Plastic brought the event to the Box Gallery in Akron, Ohio. The show titled ‘Paper of Plastic’ hosts the traditional 2d work of the participating artists as well as their take on the Kid Robot Munny.
The oil painting above is my two dimensional take on the Great Northern, pot-bellied Autumn owl.
Perky little fellow.
The owl being an inevitable motif for every young artist these days, I was kind of surprised by an initial Google Image search that there really aren’t that many owl themed Munnys out there. This was a nice surprise as it gave me some room to work.
I guess the Munny, with its legs and arms, doesn’t jump around screaming with the opportunity to become a bird. The potential was there, however with a little bit of anatomic rearranging.
As a matter personal practice, I don’t like reductively altering the basic form for a custom too much when working on it. I think part of what makes customs so interesting is the challenge in creating something unique within the limitations of the generic form.
That being said, flipping the arms upside down and cutting into the legs a little seemed to be within fair play considering my end goal for the toy.
Not to mention that I will pretty much take any excuse I can to play with a Dremmel tool.
By request I’ve converted the Autumn Owl painting into a giclee print. Copies of the print are now available in my online shop. I was able to make the print life size to the painting which is 12″ x 12″ with a half inch border.
Go ahead and order a couple for yourself.
You deserve it.
Also, I thought I would give you Photoshop users a little insight into my process for preparing an image of a Munny for web presentation. If you click on the image above you will download a 526kb ZIP file for one of the layered PSD files I used for this entry. I reduced the image size to 300px wide to shrink the file size, but you can still see what is going on.
This might not be the most interesting thing to the rest of the world, but any of you artists who have struggled with getting the best image of your sculpture should appreciate this.
In this case, I rushed the toy to the gallery before I could set up lighting and get a proper set of photos taken. I had to take a few quick shots under the gallery’s flat florescent lights. If you are interested in how I worked these photos over in order get something fairly respectable looking, feel free to download the file and play around with it in Photoshop.
Wow. This was a beefy little entry. I think I shall go take a nap.
Cheers.
