Well, for those of you who are still playing along at home, the past couple of months have been..... 'interesting'.
As I type this, we are now 9 and a half years since I first paid the $236AUD deposit and on the 18th September Phil fired off a message starting with:
Some knucklehead who read your thread just messaged me and said my sculpt is trash... Great encouragement. I've looked at the thread myself and I find the tone very condescending.
He then basically blamed me for everything, saying I could have had it 8 years ago and threatened to just send it as is.
My reply was far less diplomatic this time, given his total inability to even look at the reference photo and get the basics right. I've lost count how many times I've said the sword isn't long enough, let alone it being too low, but he never did the basic check to see. Being unable to get that fixed, I didn't even bother to bring up the fact he had the sword handle too short and he turned the hand holding it around 90 degrees for some reason.
If one needs more proof he never looks at the photo, the boots are black, not brown....
I don't know, maybe I'm being too picky, but if one is sculpting/painting, etc it all anyway, how hard is it to do a basic check on size and proportions. All it takes is having the photo in front of you while blocking things out.
As for the 8 year ago claim, I called total rubbish on that. It took him from November 2017 with a body sculpt till June 2020 to make the initial prototype. That's 3 and a half years with no changes, no feedback (hard to give feedback, when you only see a couple of photos once a year) and a whole lot of pushing (I started this thread during the middle of that time) and it was at the 9 year mark that I first saw the dress.
I then heard nothing for a while, till asking if the the 'end of June' changes were going to be done by the end of October and got the following reply on the 25th October:
I've done all I can for half the money I was expecting... please forward your address so I can send you the completed statue
That nasty message from one of your cronies was the final straw
At this stage I have no idea if its been sent or not and not really sure it matters all that much at this stage. I've either wasted $1600AUD with nothing to show for it, or I've wasted 9 and a half years to get something not worth anywhere near what I paid for it.
Initially, when Phil said the whole project would take "4 to 8 weeks from start to finish" my hope was for a statue of at least Sideshow PF quality, if not better and then a short production run where I could sell a few others to fans and at least cover most of my commission costs. At which point I would then seriously consider going again on a few others Firefly characters.
Instead that dream turned into an almost 10 year nightmare that one reads about on custom jobs...... so here's another one of those stories.
