At this stage of Molly's sculpt, Lester and Erick really cleaned her up by transferring their sculpting from Sculpey to Wax and refining all the details through melting and shaping the wax. Wax is great for making things super clean and tight. But there's always a loss in crucial nuances when transferring the sculpt from Sculpey to Wax.

When going from Sculpey to Wax a silicon mold is made to capture the shape of the sculpey form. Once that cools down, liquid wax is poured into the silicone mold and, once it cools and hardens you have a wax recreation of the original sculpey figure. Unfortunately when making the silicone molds, you see anywhere from a 3-5% shrinkage in the shape of the figure... and depending on how the silicone reacts to cooling down, the finer details of the figure and subtle shapes are lost.

We were very disappointed with how the figure looked at this stage. The figure looks very stiff and blocky. The face looked like a puppet instead of a living, breathing being. The posture came across as clunky and stiff (especially from the front). The wrinkles at the knees had a very unnatural sharp edge. The gloves looked super heavy. Even at this stage there were a lot of things to address.

Check back next Tuesday to see how the Sosa Bros. tackled the various problems.

As Lester and Erick Sosa continued sculpting Molly, we felt things were going in the wrong direction. In the earlier stages of sculpting there was an energy and dynamic nature to Molly that was lacking at this stage. The head and hands became unnecessarily large. The arms looked okay from a profile perspective but too thick from the front. Molly's chest began looking like a breast implant job gone wrong. All of these issues were addressed to the Sosa brothers and Muttpop was assured that the appropriate changes would be made to address them.

Great things always have to start somewhere. For Molly, her three dimensional form started with the initial sculpting skills of Lester and Erick Sosa. The figure was super raw at this stage. It's almost like a sculptural sketch... but you can see glimpses of Molly's personality shining through the clumps of clay.

I wonder what Lester was thinking as he brought shape to Molly's more feminine qualities?

We've just got news from our factory they they are in the final stages of production on our Molly figure based on the Oban Star Racers Animated Series. The timing couldn't be better since Oban Star Racers is finally available on DVD in the States. It's a great series... and (I may be a little biased) our Molly figure more than does it justice.

We made Molly in scale with our premiere Lucha Libre figures. So if you want a little inter-galactic/universe crossover action to see whether Molly or Red Demon would win in a mano-a-mano brawl, you can. But please do not use our figures to act out some tormented romantic fantasy... you can leave that stuff with your older sister's Barbie dolls.

Here's the first official glimpse at Molly Black Bean!

Here's "The Great Escape", a beautiful stop-motion animated short done by Drixmok (from France). Tequila never looked more animated!

The SPEED RACER live action film now has me officially excited. I can't pin-point what did it for me... but these 2 new international trailers convinced me that the hyper-color visuals can work without being cheesy. It's young and vibrant yet dynamic. I'm sold.