Pic of the Day 11

The Mouth of Sauron mini bust, by Sideshow Toys/Weta Workshop. I love this mini bust. It illustrates how much work was put into the Lord of the Rings movies, of which I am a beig fan. Check out the amazing detail on this thing, click on the image to view a much larger image, so you can see the details. There's all sorts of runes around the edges of the mask, his lips and teeth are super nasty.

This bust came to me due to a friendship I developed on the SWAN Forums a couple years back. I met a guy named Daniel, who lives in New Zealand and works as a designer for Weta Workshop, which means he worked on the coolest movie trilogy in recent history, and possibly of all time (okay, I still probably prefer the Original Star Wars trilogy).

Daniel is one of the coolest people I've had the opportunity to talk to, and his friendship has also been beneficial to my collecting. He set me up with a few LOTR items that I thought I never would have had otherwise (sure, many of them are cheaper now on eBay than what I paid for them, but at the time I got a great deal). The pictured Mouth of Sauron bust he got for me on sale, and he also got one of my most prized collectibles, the Balrog Flame of Udun statue, which I'll have to post pictures of someday. Additionally, he let me send him a book I had, The Art of the Lord of the Rings, and he signed it and had a bunch of other people sign it for me. It is awesome. I'll do pictures of it later next week. He also picked up the AFX Exclusive Animated Ringwraith maquette for me, again it's cheaper now than what I got it for, but I got it not too long after it came out when it was going for much more, so that's cool.

Anyway, Daniel's a great guy, and a very talented artist and designer. You can see the results of his work in the Lord of the Rings films, or more directly in the Art of... books, there's one for each film, and one for the trilogy. Additionally, he is featured in some of the bonus features on the LOTR DVDs.

Remember kids: Wraiths! Wraiths on wings!