ToyCyte: Toy Culture Collected

Here’s  a bit closer look at the hand-painted sample of Choegal, painted by David Choe. Text courtesy of Denise from Ningyoushi.

Upon showing the sample to the factory, their initial reaction was, ‘Thanks but no thanks.  We can’t replicate this.  It looks too hard.’  So what we had to do was call David Choe and ask him how he painted the toy.  To me, it was like asking Jackson Pollack how he painted each inch of his painting and then have to translate this to simple English through a series of how-to steps.  I believe at the end of the day, there was about 50 different steps written out on replicating the design (by layers!) on Choegal.  (See images below – hint, the one with the Black arm is David’s original).  At the end when the completed painted samples were side by side, even David Choe was impressed with the replication.

This is a consumer note.  Unlike vinyl toys where the factory replicated samples are a strong indication of the final product, each Choegal will have a slight variation as every single toy requires an artisan to replicate with a paint brush and by hand during the final mass production.

Edition of 1000 coming very very soon now…