Brock Otterbacher
Creative Director, Toys & Collectibles
We are incredibly stoked to finally share our Spider-Gwen statue with you. Here's a bit of a walkthrough/history of both the poster and the statue.
As with the other posters-turned-statues we've created, we were excited to get a chance to give the 3D treatment to some of our Marvel screen prints. For the first time, however, we were going to design a poster to be a statue from the start. And for the first character the choice was obvious - Spider-Gwen!
"Spider-Gwen?" Yup! She's great! And there's not enough product out there for her in my humble opinion.
We asked Justin Erickson of Phantom City Creative to join in the fun, and he immediately shot over a bunch of awesome concepts.
What's great about working with Justin is his brain is teeming with ideas, and he offered several more options right away. Bonus points to him for using Poser, a 3D program to help flesh out some of his ideas!
While a lot of these could have worked well for posters, it's quite a challenge to find a pose that works well for both a poster and a statue. We eventually settled on having her perched, which he had in his first round of ideas. Now the question was what she'd be perched on.
We suggested that it would be cool to have her perched on top of a building's spire to give the feeling that she's really extended into the sky, with nothing to keep her company but the city's skyline. Also, having a thin object supporting the character really draws your eyes right to her, in both 2D and 3D.
Here are my terribly rendered notes suggesting such. This is also where we get into the idea of having a switch-out hand, as Marvel felt it was important that the statue not just portray her shooting a selfie, but also a web as it would be a bit more action-oriented.
Here's a rough from Justin:
And a few more suggestions on pose, getting closer to the final poster:
And the final poster! Love this piece, especially Justin's choice of color:
For the statue, we needed a bit more design work to figure out what the spire was connected to and what this pose looked like from a 360-degree view to help guide the sculptor. Eric Siebenaler came in to nail down the design, doing a full render front and back of her slinging a web (since the poster only shows her shooting a selfie), as well as designing a cool art deco style structure for the statue to sit on.
Next, we moved the piece over to Nathan Mansfield to sculpt. At this point we decided to add Gwen's backpack to the back of the base as a fun nod to her band, The Mary Janes. In addition to this, we added an unmasked head as the Mondo Exclusive. One of the exciting things about these projects is that they're being designed and refined all throughout the process.
Once Nathan was done, we had the always-awesome Jason Wires and his team print the digital model along with Simon Garcia's amazing molding and casting job. To finish it off, we called in Mara Ancheta to add some paint magic to it. Note the magenta shading here and there as a subtle nod to the poster's original color theme.
And the final piece!
Pre-Order and view more photos of the statue here.
Special thanks to Rob Jones and Eric Garza for letting us toy boys and girls play in the poster world. More to come in this line! We have MILES to go... ;)
