Custom-Showcase: Silver Dolorosa Custom-Ghost Girl by J★RYU

After his elaborate Le Jardin De Meddy custom, J★RYU next took on Matt Siren's Ghost Girl figure-form (above-left), and made it into a magical dioramic custom named SILVER DOLOROSA, which made it's public display debut at the recently concluded San Diego Comic Con 2010 [tagged] specifically on show at the Dragatomi booth. CLICK THRU for an intense look behind-the-scenes of the making-of the custom, featuring the undisrupted description of J★RYU himself.


[Above photoshopped image via TaskOne]
J★RYU: The focus of my Ghost Girl piece, "Silva Dolorosa" shifted greatly while I was working on it. To give a little backstory, I had ordered a blank so that I could get my boy Jeremiah Ketner to customize one for me. I went ahead and ordered another so that I could maybe do something with it. Upon receiving it, it looked pretty interesting so I just went for it. I initially wanted to just make a simple custom of a cute little girl who was made of wood, a theme that is starting to reoccur in my work. Just as I was finishing up with my original idea, something just didn't sit right with the way the "hair branches" were looking and it just seemed that it had been an exercise in applying my wood look to a blank - it lacked a lot of character and meaning, plus it wasn't very convincing as a tree dryad. Thus, I decided to lop off the top of the head and make it even more stump-like, and add a bunch more detail like more more branches and texture. However, this posed a new problem.


[4 x montage of WIPs in slideshow above / Full-screen viewing / Full-WIP video viewable here]
J★RYU: Now that the top was gone, you could see straight in and I knew I had to fill it in with detail. As I was applying texture to the inside of the tree, it was natural to wonder who might live in such a place. From there, I knew I wanted to decorate the inside as well, which necessitated the inclusion of the door. As for the "Little-spooky-girl-who-plays-by-the Tree", I knew I didn't want to relegate her to the inside where she was not easily visible but if she was outside, I didn't want her to be a loose piece to my custom so I had her sit on a swing, attached to a long branch. Once it was finished, I wanted to pick a name that would really describe the setting of the little girl on the swing, the somber face and scary face on the back so I went with "Silva Dolorosa", roughly translated into "The Forest of Sorrows." And there you go.


[8 x images of finished custom @ SDCC Dragatomi's booth / Full-screen viewing]
J★RYU: I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out, despite the fact that I was literally putting final touches on it up the night before preview night, sprawled out in Ritzy Periwinkle's office in Los Angeles, hoping that I would be able to finish in time. I was checking into my hotel for SDCC and was at the hotel bar with Ritzy, Drilone and King Quan when Spankystokes called me and told me it sold before the con was officially open. I was a bit stunned but one of my fondest memories always will be of being surrounded by my toy fam when I got that call and buying the second round of drinks to celebrate "Silva Dolorosa" going to a new home. Kanpai!