TOYS
Toys, like games are serious business. The majority of my toy experience surounds custom LEGO figures. I am not a collector personally, but I love the LEGO aesthetic, and having an opportunity to professionally create custom pieces that work in the LEGO design language has been very rewarding.
miniBIGS is a custom LEGO mini figure design and production company. Formerly known as The Big Toy Hut, miniBIGS approached me about quickly rebranding their company to more clearly communicate their brand promise. They wanted to focus exclusively on LEGO products, and predominately on the LEGO minifig.
I wanted to keep the ties to the established The Big Toy Hut name and identity, but also a clear allusion to their core business. We landed on the name miniBIGS, as a play on the term minifigs (the LEGO term for their minature figure), and to evoke The Big Toy Hut brand. The logo was designed to carry though these same meanings and features a minifig head to do the letter "i" in BIGS.
Before the company changed names and became miniBIGS I was enlisted to create fan art for custom LEGO mini figures. The first and most popular were movie heroes and villains.
The first superhero related minifig that I did work on was the Joker from Batman: The Dark Knight. I created the face and torso decals as custom vector art. The face art was sized it to account for the hair and distortion due the curvature of the head piece.
I have designed several custom figures. Some employing very sophisticated printing techniques considering that they are produced one by one in a small shop using only consumer equipment. Iron man has four (4) different print passes to give him his metallic faceplate and glowing eyes. White, gold, cyan and black print passes are required for each head.
Zombies are another huge hit.
With the demand for zombie minifigs reaching a fevered pitch, LEGO relented and released a collectible zombie minifig.
The LEGO figure was not as mature as some of the adult collectors would have liked so miniBIGS brought me in to update their zombie line. They had zombies but wanted me to redesign them to fit with the art style of the LEGO zombie, with a more mature and gory feel.
The figures are a huge success and allow collectors to have a larger variety of zombies in their collection.
The recipe card I made to create one Skeletor minifig.
He-Man, Skeletor, Liono and other 80s pop culture cartoon icons were also highly requested items.As a labor of love and ode to my childhood, I created several cartoon icons from the 80s.
The recipe card for how to create the figure, the parts to use, and the art is sent along with a photoshop mock-up of the figure and the separated vector art. This is as much for my files and personal satisfaction as it is for the team producing the actual figures.
Copyright © 2010 Myron McMillin