21 FEB 2018

COOKING UP TEMPURA SAN

Share

facebooktwitter


Once again, we have decided to team up with local
(Singapore) artist, Chong Wah on yet another addition to the family of fried mutant Tempura San (which literally translates to fried prawn-man). The latest edition is proudly presented as Radioactive Tempura San. *Writer’s note: The latest edition was named as Radioactive” because a Japanese friend of mine thought the idea of a mutated tempura-san is hilarious…But naming it as Radioactive is even funnier!

For those who have bought the debut edition of Tempura San (Clear) at events and even Tempura San (OG Edition), you might have notice that there is a comic strip along with the figure. The comic strip depicts;

Tempura San living an average life as a human and he runs a little food stall in Tokyo selling none other than Tempura, he is contented to earn a sufficient amount of income to just supply his daily needs. Until one day, an accident with him involving a nuclear waste truck rendered him horribly disfigured. Despite his mutation, Tempura San is completely powerless and harmless. In fact, he is often bullied by kids around the neighbourhood, pecked by crows and even spotted crying alone several times because of his demeanour. Tempura San is now working as a mascot promoting the famous dish of Tempura at a Japanese cuisine restaurant. 

Now, let’s delve into the manufacturing aspects of Tempura San. This is the beginning of where we hope to shred some insights to our readers. 



What material is Tempura San made of? 

Tempura San’s body and limbs are made of soft Vinyl whereas the face, feelers and tail are made of PolyVinyl Chloride (PVC). Both Vinyl and PVC are types of plastic with different production processes. 
Vinyl figures are manufactured through a process known as rotocasting which liquid Vinyl material is poured into a mould and placed in an oven to spin so that the material gathers to the sides and to be pulled out while still piping hot.

Finally, it is left to cool and harden so as to retain shape. 

As for PVC, it is injected through a pipe line feeder into a mould and allowed to cool down before the removal. Once the PVC parts are removed, they are in a sheet form of a model kit with sprues attached. 



The painting of Tempura San

There are two techniques mainly used for Tempura San, spray painting and hand-painting.  

For example, the base colour of Tempura San (OG Edition) is white which we have to spray the orange over his body, limbs and feelers. Further manual touching up on the body using paintbrush is required to have the texturing effect like a real Tempura (Japanese term for fried prawn). The face has to be hand-painted to achieve the accuracy for details. 



Introducing latest edition: Tempura San
(Radioactive) 

When our team was given the task to come up with another colourway of Tempura San, we were thrilled as we could go slightly crazy” on it. We brainstormed to come up with several concepts for weeks which, the main pointers were to carry on the story of Tempura san’s mutation and we were inspired by our knowledge on the rainbow food trend” that was happening at one point of time. So we knew we wanted bright colours to go along with it! There was a lot of trial and error to see what works, and we spent time in our studio spray painting different variants to know which colour goes well with another. To further illustrate on the radioactive” idea, we decided on a glow-in-the-dark (GID) base for its body and limbs. 



For more details on the latest edition, it will be dropped on
Saturday, 24th February (11PM SGP, 10AM NYC, 3PM LDN) on the front page of www.mightyjaxx.rocks.

!!!Special announcement!!!
There will be a Tempura San (Poison) prototype giveaway for one lucky buyer of Tempura San
 (Radioactive)! Watch it change colour under UV/sunlight. We hope you will enjoy your new companion as much as we enjoyed creating it! 



Success