The Project
The idea of this project started in late 2021. As a crafting hobby I was making epoxy replicas of some Jojo’s Bouncin Bonheads, trying to create original finishes that were never made into real figures. Very quickly, fellow collectors were interested, new content in the Jojo’s collecting community was not very common, and as imperfect my casting were, I often found myself adding some in my trading packages as cool freebies.
Custom figures are cool and all, but half of the nostalgia we feel is heavily reliant on the unboxing experience. The infinite excitement of our kid brains about to open a mystery bag containing few little colorful plastic toys. The logical next step was then to create little paper bags to hide my replicas. First paper, then cardboards, I iterated quite a bit on my packages to give collectors a great experience.
Fast forwarding in mid 2024, a friend casually asked me “Ok, but why not make your own designs?”. That felt like a very obvious thing to ear, yet I never dared to give it a real thought. Until that moment anyway.
The making
I bought some fimo modeling clay and went to work. Guess what, you can’t really improvise sculpting skills, even less at a Crazy Bones scale. So I turned around and went to a more beginner-friendly tool that I knew: my computer. Using the awesome Blender software, I gave myself the challenge to complete a series of (at least) five characters.
Every character design went through a lot of phases and iterations. At some point, Blaze did not even have hairs!
I also took advantage of my fdm 3D printer, a Anycubic Kobra 2, to quickly prototype until both the design and in hand feeling were “right”.
I ended up with 7 final designs. One of them didn’t make it to the final round. It was too goofy and the shape was too different from the other six. Once finished, I commissioned a local print shop to make some batches of the figures at a 30 micrometer resolution in 3D resin printing. This step was necessary to provide me with pieces clean enough to allow me to make a silicon mold and epoxy replicas.
After some sanding and hole filling, I made two little holes underneath that would serve two purposes: by inserting a piece of plastic tube in each, I will have two stilts that will center the figure in the silicon mold, and once removed will serve me as holes in which to pour the epoxy resin.
Silicon is then poured around the figures to create a mold that will allow me to duplicate as will my Unregistered Bonehead.
It then goes into a pressure pot to remove (compress) air bubbles and cure. Once hardened end emptied, the silicon mold can be filled up with epoxy resin.
Rince and repeat until you have a great variety of colors and are happy with the results.
Packaging
A big part of this project was also to make it believable. It came through two major ideas: having some cool packaging and having a top-notch website, like in early 2000s.
There ain’t much to say here. I got my hands on some cardboard pillow cases and a very nice carboard cases, both holding a different amount of figures.
The collector case box contains all six figures in random colors, each wrapped in a paper bag. I also added a stand to display all six figures and two stickers.
Each pillow case contains two random figures, also wrapped in a paper bag and with the same two stickers.
Website
Last but not least, I had to make a cool retro website, a sort of time capsule. Of course the fun was for me, I made all of it in a bloc-note software (no IDE!) using only bare minimul html and css. No javascript, no flexbox, only what you would expect from a late-90 / early 2000 website. Of course, a mandatory visitor counter and other easter eggs hidden in a lot of places.
You can visit it (unless I’ve since deleted it) on https://unregistered-boneheads.jojos-archives.net/
Postmortem
The challenge of making a full (even if tiny) art-toy series was… Well, challenging. I planned a two-week release and teasing schedule, starting november 17th 2025. At this point I was only releasing little bits of things, a blurry picture, a fake newspaper ad, a backlighted 3D render. That was the fun part, people were overwhelmingly hyped and gave me a lot of energy to continue and to feel proud of my work. In the same time I was doing daily batches of resin replicas. That was more of a mental load than a real physical one, but my flat was still looking like a factory (and sometimes smelling like one).
Economical breakdown
Non-fun stuff but part of a portmortem, and what to expect when starting such an adventure.
Project ended up costing me a bit more than 450€.
- Resin printed master figures: ~40€
- Packaging stuff (2D art, source materials, stickers): ~ 180€
- Tools and materials (resin, silicon, tooling): ~ 250€
- This doesn’t count the time spent working on the project and many tooling I had from various resin projects (gloves, mask, pigments, colors…)
With all of that, I made 22 full series (132 figures) before my silicon molds started to broke down (slightly earlier that I would myself 🫠!)
I was expecting to sell some to recover a bit of the costs. Since I’m not a greedy bastard, my asking price was 3,50€ per figure, 9 cents more than the production cost. I gave some sets to friends and family and sold out of everything else.
What an adventure!
Gallery
