Blast off 2012

Hello 2012. I was early signing off for 2011, so it won't hurt that I am little late announcing 2012. I spent the last month in Asia and had a lot of time to plan this coming year for Nori Toy. Below is a short tour of the adventure. 

In Malaysia I got to see the freshest of sea monsters in the market. Nori managed to escape unscathed. 

There is really quite the appreciation for sculpture in a lot of other cultures. It was great to see so many public works. 

I got to see buildings that were once the world's tallests, but still some of the tallest. 

I found where a bat bike was stored. The DC store seems to be quite popular in kuala lumpur. Each one had a bike as well. 

Just some clowns in Gentang. Why so serious?

The movie version of my idol. 

Theme park in a mall. Those are roller coasters ove head. 

After a few weeks in Malaysia I got to spend a couple days in Singapore. They were preparing for New Years Eve, so there was quite the energy flowing around.  

I have a soft spot for 3rd party independent projects and was happy to see this Devastator in person at the China Square. I met Andy from Toysrevil for lunch and he showed me around to a few great shops. A special thanks to him and his hospitality. Its a shame we wereso caught up in toy talk that we forgot to take a picture together. 

Another shop there had some works from famous designers. I am a big Touma fan, so this was especially cool for me. 

I stopped by the Play Imaginative store to pick up a few things. Its getting funny how many things I collect these days, the stores won't even sell. More than a few stores had items I had been looking for my personal collection and they were for display only.

After our short stay in Singapore we headed to Japan. Nori managed to keep a low profile and avoid any sushi chefs. 

On new years we checked out one of the large shrines there. 

We spent some time in the electric city. 

Mazinger Z!  

I also got to check out things like the Kaiyodo museum. I am huge fan of the toy sculptor Yamaguchi. I have been collecting his figures even before the revoltech line. 

I was also luck enough to see the new life size Gundam statue. 

Towards the end of the trip we decided to see Mount Fuji. 

In the airport they had an impressive origami museum. 

During my time there I had some time to practice drawing. I chose to experiment with an app by Adobe called ideas. it uses vectors rather than pixels to create lines. Below are a few sketches I did.

 

It may be obvious, but I love curry. Mostly curry from Northern India, but I was able to discover new curries in Malaysia, and Japan. 

To see more images from the trip as well as future project images and news follow us on Instagram and Twitter. You can also rss feed this blog to get regular updates or like our facebook page. 

Now that I am back we are already very busy. We are working on some new projects with Villain as well a a couple other independent projects. As for Nori Toy we are building the rest of the studio now and hope to have it done by the end of the month. Our new design of the site is established and now we are working on the code end of things and hope to have it done in the near future. I am not going to give away all the news for 2012 just yet, but you will be seeing a lot more of Nori in coming projects that will require a lot more of my time drawing. So happy new year to you all and we look forward to sharing more exciting news with you!