Case Study: The Making of Tcon
TCON is the official mascot of ToyCon UK, and I was lucky enough to be the one who sculpted him. Working closely with the designers at The Hang Gang we wanted to make sure we captured the movement and dynamic nature of the logo!
Toy prototyping and production is how I spend much of my time as a freelancer, but due to the heavily protected IPs (intellectual properties) I’m working on, it’s not often that i can share images of what i do online. I thought TCON was the perfect opportunity to show you the process from sketches and ideas on paper, through to the sculpting and master making and eventually a finished product.
TCON is the embodiment of the ToyCon UK mascot, he’s designed by The Hang Gang was sculpted by me (A Little Stranger) and was produced for ToyCon UK by Unbox Industries.
TCON is available in his OG green colourway and a white DIY, both of which can be found in the ToyConUK store.
Very early stages of roughing out Tcon. He was sculpted in Sculpey, the black areas inside the mouth are the armature that i padded out with scrap polymer clay.
Working out how his eyes and eyebrows are going to look
Roughing in the teeth on a block of Sculpey to check all the dimensions are correct
Head complete, i made Tcons teeth separately from Sculpey and attached before baking the entire piece together.
Setting the teeth in with a little more Sculpey to fill the gap between the teeth and the top of the mouth. You can see his little tongue here, too.
It was important to use to convey the movement of the ToyConUK logo, so i wanted to make sure Tcon could stand easily on one leg. As the body and legs were two distinct entities i decided to sculpt the body, bake it, then add the arms and legs. This allowed me to make sure i was positioning them for perfect balance.
Arms and Legs attached, the last piece to go on was his spine which i sculpted separately, baked, and attached before the final baking.
After sanding smooth and applying a few layers of filler primer, Tcon is ready for molding. This is to allow me to make a resin version of him that will withstand a substantial clean up, he needs to be perfectly smooth before he goes to tooling. The white lines coming form his hands are styrene strip, molded with the figure to form air risers in the mold.
The cleaned up resin casting, ready to go to the factory for manufacture!
Picking out colours at the factory
The finished vinyl Tcon!