Holly Conrad
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Posts
- Mar 11, 12
- Aug 07, 11
I'm going to be updating more about our costumes and creatures we made for SDCC at Crabcat. They turned out amazing! For now, the documentary that I've been talking about for ages is finally is revealed next month at the Toronto Film Festival! Here's a picture of us in Variety magazine...I can't wait to see what comes out next!
- Jun 23, 11
Now that you've all seen the trailer...
That said, I'm sure you'd like to see some behind the scenes pictures.....more to come soon!!
If not go to www.origin.com and watch the Mass Effect trailer to see the Project we've been working on at Crabcat! We made the costumes, the husks, and some of the Alliance News designs!
The rest of Crabcat Industries and myself worked crazy hard to get this done, and we were super excited to be on set and pretend we were in the future. Woooo!
Check out some more stills from the set here! - May 19, 11
Here's your last chance to be bombarded with ridiculousness from me until the art show starts. Watch and enjoy!!
- May 11, 11Well folks it's that time again, I have an art show! If you're in the LA area, and want to come hang out and have tea with me and a bunch of monsters, you should head over on MAY 20th! at 8:00 PM at The Secret Headquarters on Sunset! I hope to see you there! Come as a monster and get a prize!
- Apr 11, 11
Hey everyone! Myself and the Crabcat team have been hard at working making tutorials on a few techniques we use while making costumes! Every other Friday I make a "Friday Fun Times Tutorial" with questions, comments, and informative rambling. Usually with the help of a questioning dinosaur. The first two episodes are below. If there's anything you'd like to see in Fun Times, please comment and we'll get to it in the videos! Enjoy!!
- Apr 02, 11
Well, I've been gone for a while! Which makes me sad, because I've been meaning to update quite a bit. PAX East was a complete success, we had a blast, took amazing pictures, and met awesome people. Here are few pictures from super talented photographer Ian Travis Barnard who captured us at the con...
I was super happy how Hawke turned out, all those days of sanding fiberglass paying off.
After that, we had our panel! The guys at Nerd Caliber were nice enough to film it, so below are the videos of me fidgeting and Jessica getting points:
Until next time everyone....weee!
~Holly - Mar 08, 11
Sorry for the silence everyone! I've been trying to make the deadline of PAX East for our upcoming panel of Hawke vs Shepard! Below are a few pictures that we got featured in this Kotaku Article.
I have tons of pictures and videos of how we did the armor, and if you watch one of our livefeeds (I tweet them @Hollyconrad) then you can see us in action!
Anyway, more work to be done, so here's some pics!
If you're going to PAX East, we'll be at our panel at 7:30 Saturday in the Cat theater! - Jan 31, 11
Just a quick update, we've been having more meetings lately getting ready to have no life for the new con season. As you know, Crabcat and myself are going to be at PAX East this March, and joining us will be Rana, the face model for Samara/Morinth! Myself and the rest of the team are art directing/creating her costume for this year's Comic Con! She's awesome, and her and a few other artists (who I will be talking about soon and introducing) are really excited to be doing crazy crap in the Crabcat studio/garage.
Anyway, here are some sketches I did later in the weekend while talking about Crabcat. Enjoy! And I'll keep you guys posted on more progress soon! - Jan 28, 11
And once I get pictures of him there, I'll see if I can get permission to post them here!
I'm super excited that it got there alright, and I've gotten a lot of awesome feedback from them. I had so much fun all last year on that project, and now it's finally grown up and a piece is in the BioWare head office. So thanks again BioWare and the wonderful artists and concept artists and writers who make their games so inspiring. YOU ALL DESERVE REAL SPACESHIPS.
All right! I see in the poll that I need to do more busts! I may do a few original designs (so, you know, I can be original) and then Mordin, Legion, or Garrus. Ideally I'd love to make another animatronic head, but time-wise that may have to be next year. But we'll see. Expect a new Hawke update soon, this weekend is an epic leather-working fest. It'll be Medieval good times.
Keep watching!! - Jan 24, 11
I know I have a billion projects, but I'd like to ask everyone something. You all know I love making anything Mass Effect/Bioware due to my love and admiration for their stories and artists, but I'm working on improving my original character/costume/creature design portfolio!
Now back to your regularly scheduled blog posts...
So! Would you guys like to see an original character sculpt by me? Which is then possibly molded and sold on Etsy? Maybe a whole sculpted figure? Illustrations?
Check out the poll to the side *points* and vote!
But first, here's some random nonsense:
~Holly - Jan 24, 11
Well, usually when you make fiberglass armor you do so by sculpting a detailed sculpt, molding it in silicone and plaster, and then casting it in either a quick casting plastic, or more fiberglass. BUT! Here at Crabcat we do things quick and dirty. Errr, or something. ANYWAY!
Here's how to make a fiberglass claw arm. It's pretty fun! You should try it....what you need...BondOooooOoOo! You're going to be mixing this with the resin. Why? Because we sculpted hawke's crazy shoulder armor out of water based clay. Resin won't cure over that, so we have to mix resin, bondo, and BOTH catalysts to add a coat over the top!Green wax! This is for putting on the fiberglass mannequin so your other fiberglass won't stick. You can get it at any local plastics shop, or ridiculous chemical retailer.Resin!This is not wheat Germ. This is MEKP, it's the catalyst for resin. We broke the lid, so we put it in a jar. It'll make you blind, so be careful!Oh and don't forget your safety gear!Bondo-resin it a cup! Catalyzed and ready to brush onto the sculpture.Brushed on! Isn't is pretty?! Now that that's on, we let it cure...and you can go play some Mass Effect while you wait for the next exciting update....or something. Also I need to make a video of this, I'll do that soon!
Next up is the actual fiberglass cloth. Make sure to cut it in vaguely the same shape as your armor, and have lots of extra chip brushes for your friends. Then you use regular resin, catalyze it, and tap out the cut pieces (that's a fancy term for pressing the brush into the cloth to wet it). Make sure not to kick it too hot (add too much catalyst) or your resin will jell up while you're applying it, and you'll cry silently to yourself in your dirty hands.
Steph is using proper safety signage. Are you?!
Tank decided to make hot dogs at 2 am. Then he fixed my car! Thanks Tank, you're a trooper. (Jessica is back there stitching Hawke's leather bag. Awesome!)
SO anyway, after wetting the strips and tapping them onto the clay/bondo-resin sculpt (making sure to get all the bubbles out!) We stick it outside to cure and hope for the best.
Next comes the cleaning, sanding, and prettying up. Keep watching!! - Jan 22, 11Quick update of a few other bits of recent progress. My next few posts are going to detail to you guys how to do a quick and dirty bit of armor fabricating. The best way to do it would be to sculpt it and then mold it. But since we're working with such simple shapes and no time (because I never got that time machine working), we have a few other options.
This is a bit of sculpting I did in about an hour on a reagular mannequin. You can probably guess where this is going...
First you sculpt your base in WED clay (that gray clay there, water-based) and then I'm going to fiberglass on top of it. *gasp* Pictures of that to come.
Anyway, anyone see any resemblance of this pointy arm accoutrement? Hmmm...
Please excuse the blurry pictures, insane creativity only arrives at 5 am. - Jan 18, 11
A while back BioWare helped us get to PAX by bidding on a new Grunt mask. And here it is! Finally after a few months, New Grunt is next to Old Grunt, and ready to get shipped up to Edmonton.
New Grunt is a slip latex brush in, with translucent sculpy teeth, airbrushed with FW inks, and made with space magic.
No really, I was going to post a tutorial on mask painting, but that'll have to come with my next mask. I got too carried way on Grunt and had too much fun to remember to tape it. Ha.
I was thinking my next mask should be something original, or possibly a design we haven't seen in Mass Effect yet that I come up with and sculpt for funsies.
So there you go! More to come soon, working on new t-shirts as well! Hand screen printed by us in my garage.As you can see, we've finally managed to make proper t-shirts. WoooO! Eventually they'll be on the Crabcat Etsy store, so if you feel like you need a piece of obscure geeky wardrobe, check them out!
I promise to post more in-progress of the visor as well as my other projects soon! Right now I'm in the *buying supplies* phase, which takes a while.
Keep watching! - Jan 04, 11
Knowing that I have no free time on my hands between the massive work load of projects this year, I've decided to do more! This mini-project of mine will be starting soon, making a replica of the Kuwashii visor from ME2, seen below:
All it needs is to be sculpted onto a bust (not necessarily mine) and then molded. It has quite a few small parts that need LEDs or fiberoptics embedded in them, so we'll see how those turn out...but you'll get to watch it on here! Wooo! Space!
Another project on the Shepard front is to improve the body suit I used last year. I didn't have time to create the screen-printed lines on the actual suit, and this year that's going to change! I'm still doing research into places that do that sort of thing in the LA area though...
Anyway, more to come soon.... - Dec 31, 10
Hey there everyone!
I've decided to start posting more of my insightful, tutorial-based posts because the new season of conventions and sleepless nights has started. Get ready for a tornado of raptors.
Sometimes in the off season of conventions, I feel like I forget what we've accomplished that year. 2010 was an awesome year. I got the best group of friends to help me make the best costumes I could, in one last space-explosion at the comic con masquerade. We did it, better than I'd ever hoped for, and in the process I got a lot of new friends, supporters, compliments, and a random part in a major motion picture. Speaking of which, my plans for 2011 are going to be revolving around making new costumes, promoting Crabcat, waiting for Comic Con Episode 4: A Fan's Hope to come out so that I can see how ridiculous I look on the big screen, and then not-so-patiently waiting for ME3 and the conclusion of Shepard's story (DIE REAPERS DIE).
If anything, this year has changed me a lot. In what I want to do with my life, and what I want to do to give people something they will remember. Bringing games to life like we did really made a difference, I think, and gave people something else to escape reality with.
But either way, we have a saying that comic con gets better every year, and hopefully that stands true this year as well. So thanks to everyone that donated, and that became a part of this awesome new costume-creating group of awesomeness.
Awesome. (again)
~Holly - Dec 16, 10
Another update from the Crabcat team!!
We're starting a new con season, so expect rainbows to go flying out of my eyes at any moment. (listen for the muffled sobbing as I get no sleep...)
Enjoy! - Dec 02, 10
- Nov 24, 10
So my amazingly talented and hilarious outspoken grandpa has published his first book! Not only has he helped me immensely over the years artistically and as a mentor, but he's always been an inspiration and is one of animation's visual effects legends. Here's a quick little blurb about it from the Cartoon Boom blog ...
"Dorse A. Lanpher is one of a handful of artists who can say he worked on Disney classics like Sleeping Beauty and 101 Dalmatians as well as contemporary features like Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, Aladdin, and Tarzan. Lanpher recently self-published a memoir called Flyin’ Chunks and Other Things to Duck: Memoirs of a Life Spent Doodling for Dollars. His 48-year-career as an effects animator also included an extended stint with Don Bluth on projects like The Secret of NIMH, Dragon’s Lair and An American Tail, which is why Don Bluth penned the book’s foreword. The book sells for a modest $18 on Amazon, and judging from the preview pages on that website, it’s filled with a lifetime’s worth of important and untold stories about working in feature animation."
So yeah, that's my Grandpa! He's as cool as he sounds, and you should read his book.
Especially because he calls me a brat at one point. Now I KNOW you want to read it... - Nov 18, 10
- Nov 08, 10
So I decied to make a Blasto the Hanar Spectre Puppet for this upcoming charity event from G33kwatch! Check out their flier below, and go watch them play Mass Effect for an excruciatingly long time, while donating money and possibly getting your very own Big Stupid Spectre Jellyfish made by me! - Nov 03, 10
What have we been up to at Crabcat Industries? Not much that's productive, but I carved a pumpkin and Jessica ripped her face off. Oh, and we met some Zombies! Come see!
- Oct 16, 10
More shenanigans from the Crabcat Team! This time: Failed Taxidermy. Make this your next obnoxious email forward to your co-workers. - Oct 03, 10
Thank you to all who supported us at PAX! I'm posting the panel videos below, they're long, but if you watch the third video you'll see the Q&A, which is easily the most entertaining as well as the line up of costumes! Enjoy!
Wooo! What an awesome panel, and awesome people. If we get to go again next year expect more costumes, more of Crabcat, more shenanigans, and present! ;D
Now with everything dying down in convention land, it's back to job hunting for me. I've gotten a few temporary jobs but to keep myself making things and Crabcat going, I need to find something more secure.
So, it's job hunting time!
Which, honestly, can get me kind of down. While I may have a lot of designs, costumes and sculptures, I feel like I'm no where NEAR the caliber that they expect in the movie industry. That's not going to keep me from trying though. Ultimately, one day in the distant future when there's either a zombie apocalypse or a cure for cancer, I'd love to be an actual designer of costumes/creatures/etc for movies, games, what-have-you. You know, the one that gets to illustrate the ideas, etc. Creative stuff. But, as lofty as it is, it's a goal I'm holding on to, and I won't give up.
I have lots of plans for costumes coming up, one being a Dr. Strange costume along with Nightmare (two of my favorite Marvel characters) as well as some post-apocalyptic battle armor! So once the funds begin those will as well....keep watching this blog for updates!!
