*RECAP* Toy Art Gallery's "Open Call Resin Toy Juried Show" 6/10/2011

Last night Toy Art Gallery played host to their first annual (of hopefully many more) "Open Call Resin Toy Juried Show"! This show was an open call for any and all artists/toymakers with an original resin toy, all of which entered their pieces for a chance to win some fantastic prizes! The day started out early as I was one of the 5 judges asked to judge the pieces for the show. Along with myself TAG asked Jeremy Brautman (jeremyriad.com), Ayleen & George Gaspar (toybreak.com), and Julie B. (prettyinplastic.com), to critique each and every one of the entries in 5 different categories... which was a super daunting task and ended up taking all of us over 2 hours to complete, and in fact we finished just in time before the show opened!

As the doors opened people began to flow into the gallery and were thoroughly impressed with the craftsmanship on the majority of the pieces. There were 3 tiers apparent to me when looking at the pieces, ones that were immaculately designed and almost production like, others that were just about up to that quality, just needed to be more polished, and others that just seemed rushed, and not very polished at all... and in all honesty should really not have been entered... but all of this is expected with an open call and needless to say it was cool to see every single one of these pieces under one roof! As the night wrapped up, the votes were tallied and the top 4 spots were announced! Coming in 3rd place was a beautiful clear totem resin piece by C-Toys named "Ra", 2nd place was given to Paul Kaiju's amazingly well crafted and designed "King Jinx", and 1st place went to the perfect production like "Cosmic Hobo" from Arbito... amazing! Lastly there was an honorable mention and that was given to GUF of Tattoo Royale's piece "Gummi Larry"... very well deserved! You gotta hit the jump for more pictures and please enjoy the video above :-)