Custom Corner: Tangled Tower

Posted on September 5, 2015 by A. Raden

This week we venture into Disney Princess territory and visit Rapunzel in her iconic tower. At only three inches tall, and created by Jared Flores, this micro detailed piece is astounding. The bricks breaking through a crack in the towers surface are each marked with realistic highlights and shadows. Greenery hanging from the tower and growing along the cracks show such variation in color that each infinitely tiny leaf seems like it could be picked out from all the rest. A minuscule Pascal perches on the tower’s window ledge, Rapunzel leaning out the window behind him, herself so detailed you can even see her teeth through her thinly painted grin.

A Disney fan all his life, Flores was immediately in love with the idea of Vinylmations when they first started popping up in the Disney parks. It took a few years for him to decide to work on custom figures in earnest, but there’s been no looking back ever since, having completed Vinylmation designs from “Star Wars” to “The Three Caballeros” and even beyond Disney for figures from Pokemon and The Legend of Zelda. Lately he’s been drawn to architectural pieces inspired by Disney, Rapunzel’s Tower being a structure he hadn’t yet tackled. Trained as a realist painter, everything Flores creates is done by hand, from sculpting through painting. “[I] just can’t get away from a brush,” Flores noted on his process, and his years of painting experience clearly show in this piece.

There is such a high amount of shading and highlighting and tiny, tiny lines that when turning it ’round and ’round more and more components are revealed. This is not a figure that can be glanced at and forgotten, it compels you to continue exploring from every angle so you can discover all of its microscopic secrets. The sculpted facets of the piece flow so seamlessly into each other and into the mouse-eared Vinylmation base that the realization that sculpted aspects even exist comes secondary to soaking in all the painted features. Flores’ experimentation with miniature detail work has certainly paid off with this figure, resulting in an undeniable masterpiece.