Over a week ago, World of Pop! Volume 7 became available for purchase, capturing an entire year's worth of Pop! characters and representing dozens of fandoms and story lines. In addition to containing a marketing image of each Pop!, Funko's exceedingly talented art department collaborated to create stunning, artistic photos inspired by their favorite fandoms and characters.
Every year since 2012, Funko has released an art book and catalog documenting the year's worth of new Pop! figures resulting in World of Pop! Volumes 1-6. With World of Pop! Volume 7 recently released, bringing with it a brief opportunity to buy the previous books as well, it seems like the perfect opportunity to celebrate and share some beautiful Pop! art.
Unfortunately, a single book can only contain so many Pop! images and World of Pop! Volume 7 simply didn't have space for all the photographs captured by the art team, however amazing they might be. Since many of the photos that didn't make the cut deserve to be seen, we'll be sharing them over the next few weeks. In addition to artistic photographs, each Didn't Make the Cut feature will include some background information from the artist that created the image--their relationship to the fandom and characters, any special techniques they used while capturing the photograph and interesting occurrences while shooting.
Happy looking and reading!
Artist: Adam Wolfe, Sculptor
"I really love Parks and Recreation and wanted to do a showcase piece on our Leslie Knope Pop! because she's such a fun character and a really cute and detailed Pop! I immediately thought of her Wall of Inspirational Women and thought it would be fun to try to recreate a few of them with our own Pop! Yourself avatar creator.
After I had the initial idea down, I had to build a little set to work as a backdrop for the portraits, so I bought some wallpaper-textured paper samples and glued it down to a cardboard backdrop I built. Deciding which wallpaper to use probably took longer than actually taking the photo, honestly. I ended up going with blue and white because Leslie's wearing red shoes, so it seemed like a good fit.
I visited a handful of hobby shops to try to find miniature photo frames, but they were all either way too small or not small enough, so I made some of my own with cardboard and gold paint. She's standing on a tiny black wooden shelf I had, with the empty photo frames glued to the wall behind her. I decided to take the photo with empty frames so I could edit the portraits in at the highest possible resolution since I was worried printed versions would be blurry at that size (just a little bit bigger than a postage stamp!).
After that, I made Pop! Yourself portraits of three of Leslie's heroes (I took this photo almost a year ago, but I believe they were supposed to be Michelle Obama, Hilary Clinton, and Janet Reno) and edited them into the frames. I really enjoyed the final outcome of this piece because I feel like the scale makes her look life-sized, instead of 4 inches tall!"