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Wednesday, November 11, 2015

HIGH ADVENTURE "HIGH FIVE" ALBUM COVER




High Adventure is a Fan-Rock band, based out of Connecticut. Since 2008, these musicians have gathered a worldwide following of fanboys and fangirls with their passionate music about comic books, movies, video games, loving life and the fandom experience. The band has already been featured on NPR, "The Force-Cast," "RebelForce Radio," "The Indy-Cast," and "TechnoRetro Dads". They have played high profile shows like New York Comic ConStar Wars CelebrationComiCONNRhode Island Comic Con and Boston Super Mega Fest!  High Adventure's music was also featured in the soundtrack of the Star Wars documentary "The Force Within Us".

High Adventure have recently finished their PledgeMusic campaign, and wrapped up the finishing touches to their fifth album entitled “High Five”. It is the first album to feature the entire 8-piece band together in the studio. All 14 songs are mastered, the digital files have been released, and the album art has now been submitted for publishing for the official upcoming CD release. High Adventure can’t wait to share their new music with all their fans! 

Customs for the Kid was really honored to have been asked to contribute to the album art for their "Eight Against A World!" inspired cover. Lead singer Glen Nelson just told me what he was looking for and I set to work. It took a few months to bang it all out, but with some careful planning and hard work, I finished the project just as the album was being mastered.

It was an extremely tight time frame, so we outsourced the head sculpts for the band to the web based company thatsmyface.com. From one (to two) photos of yourself, ThatsMyFace, will utilize patent-pending 3-D modeling techniques previously reserved to film studios and professional 3-D designers, to reconstruct your face in 3-D. Then using cutting-edge manufacturing technologies pioneered by the car prototyping industry, ThatsMyFace lets you either choose to order your head only and fit it onto your existing action figure bodies, or buy their complete action-figures pre-fitted and fully clothed. Your lifelike action-figure head is created out of a hard resin composite in full 24-bit color. For our project, we only needed the heads produced.  Creating eight one-of-a-kind head sculpts for each of the band members would have taken me a year to complete with all my additional duties maintaining the Customs for the Kid blog.

With all the sculpt-work I already had to do on the bodies of these characters, shortcuts needed to be applied wherever possible. Already I had to sculpt three unique head sculpts for Jaxxon, Hedji, and Chewbacca.  Even though the three heads would only be held under the action figures arms, or in their hands, it was important to communicate to the viewer that the High Adventure band members were just getting out of their costumes after completing their comic book cover shoot for Marvel. I even went as far as creating wigs out of cotton for the Amaiza Foxtrain and Don-Wan Kihotay figures.  Every last detail was considered as I made these figures to recreate the look of the cover of the Marvel edition of Star Wars #8: Eight for Aduba-3.  It was lots of fun bringing these misfit spacers to life as I mashed them up with the band members of High Adventure.

It was really cool that High Adventure gave a nod to the niche artwork of the Star Wars custom action figure community.  It's an aspect of fandom that is often overlooked, but offers plenty of thrills once discovered. The artform has really received some positive press these last few years on Star Wars fan sites around the web.  Panels featuring Star Wars custom action figures and the work of a few number of select artists were showcased at the last two Star Wars Celebrations.  It's really cool when fans from different sides of the Star Wars community can collaborate to make something truly special.












Album cover photographer Andrew Kraemer photographing Darth Daddy's diorama.














High Adventure gave "Customs for the Kid" a signed copy from the band of the Marvel edition of Star Wars #8: Eight for Aduba-3.