Bax Bear
Keep 6 Contemporary, a contemporary/ low-brow/ pop-culture gallery a few streets down, is having an upcoming exhibition for these vinyl toys called Bax Bear. They gave me one of the ‘DIY’ versions of the bear to paint as I wished, to be part of the show.
So, seeing how I’ve never painted a toy before (unless you include the really awful paint jobs I did on model aeroplanes back when I was a kid), I decided to document the inaugural process.
Got started at the ‘other’ table in the studio. Normally the light box occupies this area. But since it’s basically a plastic box, I move it around sometimes so I can do other things at the table.
I didn’t really plan out the bear. I’ve had a really busy last month so I wanted to do something a bit more organic. That and I didn’t feel like getting stressed over designing something and then having to replicate it perfectly on said bear.
I got some gold acrylic paint and a couple of opaque acrylic markers. I didn’t use the white one in the end and the gold marker tends to smudge if you rub it, so mostly I ended up working withthe paint.
The arms look like little pieces of poop when they’re on their own. I sorta tattooed them.
Gold acrylic and some red acrylic I mixed with the gold. You can’t really see the red on the paint job, it’s more of an undercoat.
Left over stencils. I used some plastic wrap thing mostly, since it was cheaper than airbrush stencil film and it was at the shop. It’s probably too tacky for illustratino board but it worked surprisingly well on vinyl.
An array of small brushes used.
The bear was designed to pull apart for painting. Annoyingly, it wouldn’t fit back together again when I was done. A call to the curator revealed that several people were also having this problem. Rafi suggested trimming the edges of the joints to make them fit. These are the little plastic shavings resulting from that. Amazingly I did not trim off the tips of my fingers in the process.
Yay. Bear’s done. Coupled with a katana, and he looks pretty cool!
Bear-vertising. These are my buttons. Buy them – the power of the bear compels you…
