Thursday, July 19, 2007

Confessions of a Toy Junkie

And now for something completely different. I don't have much new sketchbook stuff but I wanted to post something new, so I decided to post some pictures of my art room/ toy museum. One of my favorite things to do in the world is to go to garage sales, flea markets and thrift stores and hunt for any cartoon character or monster toy I can get my hands on. I have filled my "studio" with many of these finds, and there are tons more that I don't even have the room for to display. These photos are the tragic results of this sick obsession.The vertical stack of books between the two shelves are all of my old sketchbooks since high school. The shelf on the left is chock full o' cartoon and art books that I try and draw inspiration from, but basically just serve to show me how far I have to go in becoming a "real artist".
My Mickey Mouse collection actually lives in our bedroom on top of our entertainment center. My wonderful wife is gracious enough to share her sleeping quarters with Walt Disney's famous rodent.
The Simpsons live here as well, they seem to enjoy each other's company.

Back to my room, my love of giant monsters knows no bounds. Here is a small sampling of my King Kong collection, the red and green monster is a Kong wannabe from the awesome 16-bit game "Primal Rage".
Superman and Batman are my absolute favorite superheroes of all time (Plastic Man is my third favorite since I KNOW you were wanting to know).
My shrine to one of my idols and an absolute creative genius, Jim Henson. He watches over my drawing table and gives words of encouragement and inspiration.
One of my linoleum prints from college lives behind some Ren and Stimpy stuff, the first animated cartoon that made me want to draw.
Another shelf of toys, books, and more toys. This needs to be organized REALLY badly.

My wall of movie monsters and villains. The Crow figure is signed by James O' Barr and the Captain Spaulding figure is signed by Sid Haig.
My grandmother gave me this vintage typewriter, so I naturally had to cover it with more crap. It sits on top of an awesome ceramic camel that my other grandmother gave to me. That's a framed Ed Wood poster behind it, one of my absolute favorite movies of all time.
My small but growing collection of glow-in-the-dark toys. It looks pretty cool to see them all glowing at once, that's my custom Munny on the right behind Herman Munster.
Yet another shelf. The top row has my Looney Tunes and other classic cartoon characters, the middle is my Kid Robot collection, and the bottom stuff is whatever would fit. I'm proud of my Slimers.
Of course the King of the Monsters gets his own shrine as well. When I was little I could never find any Godzilla toys and it killed me, I even went so far as to make a custom Godzilla from an old dinosaur figure I had. As soon as I had my own money to blow I began to compensate for this lack of Godzillas.
I have plenty more but I think that's all any sane person could stand for now, I'll be back soon with more art. Also, everybody go check out the blog of the immensely talented and super cool Justin Winslow:

3 comments:

JustMe said...

Hey Dave!
Your toy collection blows me away!!! It's crazy...you know that, right? Clinically. But that's what I love about it!

Sorry it's taken me a while to comment. I just got back from out of town...and checked out your blog, and saw all these pictures of familiar toys strewn across your (bedroom?) and immediately had to check them out!

Diggin' that ode to Jim Henson. And wow, those glow-in-the-dark ghosts are off the chain (:>)!

Lastly, but not least, thank you so much for the shout out at the bottom! I 'ppreciate that.

David DeGrand said...

Hey buddy! I'm addicted to my toys, that's all I can say. I suppose there's worse things to be addicted to, right? Thanks for your comments man, it's always nice to hear what you have to say! I'll have some more sketchbook stuff up soon.

Unknown said...

Well, The toys shown in the blog look so cute and amazing. Thanks for sharing it here. By the way I too had a huge collection of Godzilla toys. I like them so much.