CREATIVE PROCESS & MINSET

From the first time he scribbled a wide-eyed creature in the margins of his elementary school notebook, the line between cute and creepy has been more of a playground than a barrier. For the mind behind Creatureporium, fascination with the monstrous began early — not with nightmares, but with a sense of wonder at the peculiar, the offbeat, the beautifully bizarre. Today, that instinct drives a career devoted to sculpting “ugly chibi horror-collectibles” that straddle the impossible divide between irresistible and unsettling. In this behind-the-scenes conversation, he shares how instinct, obsession, and a refusal to play by anyone else’s rules shape every Creatureporium original — and why the process is always more about chasing curiosity than following a formula.

YOUR FIGURES ARE DESCRIBED AS UGLY CHIBI HORROR-COLLECTIBLES, HOW DO YOU FIND THE BALANCE BETWEEN CUTE AND CREEPY?

Honestly, it is rather challenging because my brain and my desire to create almost always gravitate towards the creepy over the cute. And so there’s no better example of this than when we first launched the Creatureporium cuties.

If you look at, you know, Dra-Cute-La or Frankie or Mitzi Mummy compared to say Wendy-Go or Popeye or even the Wizard of Ahhh line of cuties, there is a very gradual shift from cute, creepy to creepy cute. There is a difference between one word and the other. And when you inverse them, it creates a whole different thing. And that’s more kind of a, I guess it’s just an instinctual thing. It just sort of evolved that way because I love to put detail into my creatures. And there’s just something vastly more interesting to me about turning something hideous into something that you might want to hug versus somebody you want to hug into something hideous. So I hope that makes sense. But yeah, it really is just about trying to find that balance.

But more importantly for myself as the primary designer and creator of our products, it’s about reining in the desire to make things more hideous than anything. It defeats the purpose of calling them a cutie if they’re not cute. So yeah, and then the same thing with the Necronomes, you know, Slashy was creepy and cute or cute and creepy, however you want to put it. But by the time you get to our latest one, which is Icky, he is just full on hideous.  But I never claimed that the Necronomes were all cute. So there’s that.

DO YOU EVER GET CREATIVELY BLOCKED? HOW DO YOU BREAK THROUGH IT?

So yes, every once in a while, I will not say that it’s like a creative block, but it is sort of the work, the technical work aspect of what we do definitely just kind of stifled the creativity deadlines and getting things delivered on time and having certain things produced on time. All of that stress does kind of add a little bit extra to the mix that makes ideation a little bit more challenging sometimes. The way I usually get through that is by just doing a little bit more of the same. I’ll sketch at night before bed or all the work on an illustration or a doodle and 3d or something. And a lot of times what will end up happening is I’ll end up creating the base for a full on product and I won’t even realize because as time goes time, you know, hours go by. And if you’re not stopping, you’re just going over and before you know it, you have a base form that is so detailed that to scrap it is just asinine. So you might as well move forward with it.

That’s happened quite a few times. But really just the way to combat any sort of writer’s block or sculptors block or painters block or whatever is to just do that very thing that you don’t want to do or struggling to do. And eventually you’ll kind of warm up the brain enough that it will start working again. It’s just a matter of doing what you don’t feel like doing. That’s especially true of writing.

You know, it doesn’t matter if you’re writing crap that day, you make sure you make your word quota for the day. Otherwise, what are you even doing? You know, and I do understand my philosophies and the way that I do things are a bit hard driven. Not everybody works that way.

I don’t have any sympathy for anybody who doesn’t work that way, though. It depends on what you want. You know, you can sit there and you can have creative block and you can let it defeat you or you can power through it. And then you have something to show for it. I mean, I’d be the best thing in the world, but you’ll have something to show for it.

Maybe that can lead to springboarding other creative things that you will have to show for your effort in the future. But the point is, you do not succumb to those moments of abject brain laziness or apathy or whatever is atrophy or stress. Everything in life is about stress right now as gravity is pushing down on us. Our bodies are enduring stress. Everything is stressful. It’s how you respond to it that matters.

WHAT’S THE MOST DIFFICULT OR TIME-CONSUMING PART OF SCULPTING ONE OF YOUR PIECES?

As I mentioned earlier, the most difficult part is really just the sculpting phase and it’s not difficult in an artistic sense.

It’s difficult in a physical sense. Yeah, so my entire environment works for me. I have technology and hardware that I have accrued over the years that make my quality of life extremely, extremely high. It’s when I go out into the outside space where things kind of become a bit of a challenge. But I have gigantic screens. I have my setup so that I can really bring my face close to whatever it is that I’m trying to work on. So my digital pen display is a 22 inch display. It’s a big, big display so I can zoom in and do all my detail. My iPad is one of the big 13 inch ones so I can do my zebra sculpting on the go without having to sacrifice any sort of eye strain or anything like that. That is really just the thing that is the most challenging.

It takes me vastly longer to sculpt an asset now than it did before I had my eye surgery. But again, it doesn’t matter and that’s all I’m going to say about that because there’s nothing else that needs to be said about that. Just do the work, period.

YOUR CREATUREPORIUM CUTIES LINE HAS A VERY DISTINCT STYLE- HOW DO YOU DECIDE WHAT FITS WITHIN THAT LINE VERSUS ANOTHER?

So, I mean, as far as this style, the uniformity of the cuties, there isn’t a whole lot that needs, there’s not a lot of criteria that needs to be met beyond certain things. They have to be a certain height and certain dimensions and have certain physical proportions. But as far as the visual aesthetic of them, they could be extremely cartoony, like overly simplified cartoony or extremely, extremely detailed or something in between. It really just depends on what kind of story you want to tell with that particular product. So, it’s more about telling a story than it is about being concerned with whether or not it fits into this world or what have you.

But I would like to think that if they all kind of carry the same visual style DNA-wise in terms of like what I envision for the product line, they almost all always, I’m sorry, have a bit of a uniformity to them, something that when you pick it up, you know it is a creatureporium cutie.

HOW DO YOU KNOW WHEN A PIECE IS “DONE” AND READY TO SELL?

So, a product is done and ready to sell when it is cut and keyed and that’s pretty much it. So, that’s the last stage of the actual engineering aspect of it. You know, once the design is good to go, it’s really just about making sure that it is easy to assemble or not necessarily easy even, but just efficient to assemble.

And then from there, it’s off to the races. So, the last stage after the 2D concepting image and then the sculpting is the cutting in King. Once you get that down, you have all the tolerances for the gaps and whatnot and spacing and things that are needed in order to efficiently assemble this thing. That’s when you know you’re finished. And even then, you’re never really finished because there are quite a few version 2 and version 3 iterations of certain products that you have to inevitably develop as you learn what does and doesn’t work in terms of manufacturing because not all first editions or first versions of something will be the de facto way of doing it because there are a lot of different factors from assembly to how they’re painted. So, for certain things, you might have to disassemble one thing in order to make the painting of all of them a little bit more efficient or maybe you need to merge two things in order to make it more efficient and so on and so forth.

So, you don’t really know until a couple of months after you start producing them, whether or not you need to do any refinements or anything, but it’s happened a few times and I don’t see that ever ending for any company, really.

WHAT’S YOUR PERSONAL FAVORITE PIECE YOU’VE EVER MADE AND WHY?

So, that is a good question and quite frankly, I don’t know that I have a favorite, favorite piece off the top of my head. If I like a knee-jerk reaction, I would say maybe my very first creepkeeper that I ever sculpted was 12 inches tall only because it was signed by John Kassir and it’s one of the only things I have that I’ve actually collected of my own. But I don’t know that it’s my favorite, it’s just what I have on hand.

It might be my favorite and I’m just not aware of it, but honestly, every one of them is my favorite until the next product comes and then that’s my favorite. I don’t have much sentimentality when it comes to my pieces. The goal is to always make something that is better than what you produced before anyway. So, they’re all just my favorite asset until the next asset comes along.  Not that I don’t love them all, but yeah, they don’t stay my favorite forever.

HOW DO YOU PUSH YOURSELF TO KEEP IMPROVING AS A DESIGNER AND SCULPTOR?

So, I think it sort of comes naturally. You have to push yourself to be better. But really, it’s sort of a by-product of just doing more of the same. You get better at what you do the more you do it.

I definitely believe that there is no such thing as being the best or knowing everything. You’re always going to be improving or you should anyway. So, that’s an ongoing process. I don’t really know how to answer the question of how to approach it or tackle it because it’s usually, certainly if you are working from a place of honesty in your creative process, it’s a natural evolution that you will get better. It’s the people that think that they’re already God’s gift to sculpting or an amazing artist. They’re usually the ones that fall by the wayside ultimately because they’re not innovating, they’re not evolving, they’re not growing. So, eventually that gap in artistic momentum will come to a crawl and they will be left out in the dust.

You never want that as any sort of creative, right? So, you have to constantly be self-assessing and working towards being better with every piece that you produce, which ties into the last question that was asked. That’s why I don’t have a favorite because you’re supposed to try to do your best every single time and outdo yourself. And if you can, fantastic. If you can’t, that’s also okay, but at least you’re trying to do that.

And I don’t believe in trying or hoping or wishing. I think those words are absolute garbage, but when it comes to something like creating a new piece, try is the only acceptable thing that I can use in that context because it’s up to the consumer, it’s up to the person viewing it as to whether or not you outdid yourself or you did better. So, that’s where it becomes an attempt as opposed to just a de facto, no, that is better.

It’s not up to us to decide, it’s up to the person who sees it to decide.

IF YOU COULD CREATE ANY DREAM FIGURE OR COLLECTIBLE WITH NO LIMITS ON LICENSING OR BUDGET, WHAT WOULD IT BE?

So, my dream piece that I would love to create probably would be a life-sized alien queen of my own sculpture design, probably. You know that or maybe Bruce the shark, like a full-size roughly. But the thing is, both of those exist, but it’s more the queen. I would just love to be able to sculpt the alien queen life-sized and have it brought to life in a warehouse corner or something forever for me to enjoy. That said, right now we are developing a 56 inch tall alien queen she’ll have to do for now.