Milo and Ditch (part 1/3)

A few months back, MINDstyle and Disney teamed up to launch Experiment 626, an international tour of customized Stitch vinyl figures from a wide variety of artists. Due to my schedule I was only able to recently crack open the big box of Stitch that had been sitting in my studio for months. Fortunately my piece is finally done, and will be joining many fine pieces in the tour in San Diego at the International Comic Con next week!

I figured this was a good opportunity to give you a quick behind the scenes look at my piece, “Milo and Ditch”.

First we start off with a nice piece of clean white rotocast vinyl direct from MINDStyle. Stitch is about about 11″ tall (with ears!).

Normally when presented with such a nice and iconic blank figure, simply painting it up in my own style would suffice. Obviously I hate myself. Time to break Stitch down into his basic components and see what we get.

One of Stitch’s most recognizable features are his huge alien ears. Obviously those need to go!

Then I spend some time playing around with the components. I briefly considered re-purposing the ears wings, but they didn’t quite fit in with my final concept. For a day or two Stitch’s head was destined to be the top of a mushroom! What you see above is the final basic configuration I decided to work with.

Carrying over from my days doing 3d work and animation, I tend to “pre-viz” projects like this. I take a basic photo of the forms and play around with color, artwork applications and concepts in Photoshop.

Next post, the real work begins!