Moonstone was the first

Our first statue. Our first collaboration with Pascal Blanché. Our first attempt to take one of his original characters from Derelict Planet and turn a piece of digital artwork into something you could actually put on a shelf.

It worked.

We wrote about how that came together in our post on Moonstone. 

Then came the harder question: what comes after?

For us, the answer was Jaak.

A different kind of bounty hunter

We grew up on Star Wars, so a bounty hunter was always going to get our attention.

But Jaak wasn't your typical bounty hunter.

She hunts giants across dying worlds, taking trophies, collecting bounties and scavenging rare technology. Pascal had given her the kind of backstory that made you want to know where she'd been and what she'd seen.

In his artwork, she's standing on the skull of a tech-Giant she just killed.

Jaak, original artwork by Pascal Blanché

One arm is a cluster of mechanical tentacles. The other holds her weapon.

She doesn't look particularly impressed about it.

That's one of the things we loved about the character.

There is no victory pose. No raised fist. No moment of celebration.

She looks like she's already thinking about what comes next.

And that was Jaak. Mysterious, capable and completely at home in a universe that seemed determined to kill her.

It was exactly the kind of character we wanted to make a statue of.

The mechanical tentacle arm, hand-painted in our workshop

The Hunter and the Blademaster

Jaak actually gave us two characters to work with.

The Giant Hunter carries her rifle and wears her hood.

The Blademaster wears a kasa and carries a spear.

Both versions are included, with interchangeable heads, weapons and additional bases that give the statue a completely different look.

Jaak in the Giant Hunter configuration, with the Blademaster kasa and spear on their display bases

Jaak in the Blademaster configuration, with the Giant Hunter hood and rifle on their display bases

That wasn't a random feature we added because switch-outs are cool.

Pascal's artistic process often involves kitbashing, combining and reworking elements to create his characters. His work naturally lends itself to this kind of treatment.

We liked it.

And for our first three statues with Pascal, we decided to embrace it.

But that doesn't mean every House of Gog statue needs switch-outs. If the artwork doesn't call for it, we don't add them.

The piece comes first.

From pixels to polystone

There is a funny thing about making a statue from digital artwork.

On a screen, you can make anything work.

You can put a character in any pose. Give them impossible proportions. Hide things that don't need to exist. Move the camera until everything looks right.

Then you have to make the physical object.

Suddenly gravity matters.

So does weight.

So does balance.

So does the fact that someone has to cast it, paint it and assemble it, and in our case that someone is us, in our own workshop, by hand.

That was the real work behind Jaak.

A ZBrush sculpt review, marked up with our notes for the sculptor

Jaak in production, unpainted and waiting for the next stage

A grey prototype, painted flat so we could judge the form alone

How do you take what makes Pascal's illustration work and make it physical without losing its essence?

How do you preserve the silhouette?

How do you make that strange mechanical arm feel like it belongs there?

How do the two versions of the character work as actual statues?

Those were the problems we had to solve.

And this was where the relationship between House of Gog and Pascal started to become something bigger than turning artwork into statues.

We were learning how to build around an artist's work.

The gamble

There was another challenge.

In 2019, much of the statue market was built around characters people already knew. Superheroes. Movies. Video games. Established franchises with decades of recognition behind them.

We had none of that.

Our second statue was a giant hunter from a dying planet, created by a Montreal digital artist.

Pascal was already one of the early pioneers of digital art, but outside that community he was not yet a name collectors recognized.

There was no movie coming.

No game.

No comic franchise waiting to send collectors our way.

Just the artwork.

That was the bet.

And honestly, we didn't know how the market would respond.

There was no built-in audience for Jaak. The artwork had to make the introduction.

And it did.

Jaak, the Giant Hunter

Pascal even created an illustrated introduction to Jaak, giving us a glimpse into the character and the strange universe she inhabits.

The origins of Jaak are unknown. A veil of mystery shrouds her path and yet the stories of her mythical exploits are found in every star system, even to the dark fringes of the Deep.

Hunting for trophies, collecting bounties or scavenging rare technology, they say she has single-handedly taken on the most feared bandits of the Galaxy and slain the mightiest creatures of the lands.

Echoes of a rumour are heard about her roaming the surface of the dying world of Derelict Planet, seeking her most prized trophy.

"As the tech-Giants lay waste, a cloaked figure appeared and a sense of dread overwhelmed them, for they felt fear."

You can read Pascal's illustrated intro story for Jaak on our site. 

The opening panel of Pascal's illustrated intro story for Jaak

Moonstone started it. Jaak defined the direction

This is the part that is easy to miss when you look at House of Gog today. By the time you've seen the statues, the artists and the worlds we've built around them, the direction can seem obvious.

It wasn't.

We weren't interested in chasing characters people already knew. We wanted to work with artists whose work we loved and bring their original characters into the physical world.

And we didn't want to take an illustration and turn it into a product.

The statue had to feel like it belonged to the artist. Like it was another expression of their work, rather than merchandise built around it.

At the same time, we wanted to give collectors something they weren't seeing everywhere else. New characters. New artists. New worlds. Pieces that could make you stop and think, I've never seen anything like this before.

That meant giving the artist a real voice in the process and figuring out what the character could become in physical format.

That was the kind of work we wanted House of Gog to make.

Looking back

Jaak was our second statue. Today, House of Gog has worked with artists across very different worlds and built an entire catalogue of original art statues, prints and characters.

What has stayed with us is the desire to keep expanding what collectibles can be. To work with artists we believe in, introduce collectors to characters and worlds they may never have encountered and keep pushing ourselves creatively with every piece we make.

Moonstone was where House of Gog began. Jaak was where we started to define what House of Gog would become.

And looking back now, that's probably the most important thing about her. She wasn't just our second statue. She was the first sign that we had found our direction.

Jaak in the Blademaster configuration. Photography by Nchanzplace

Jaak, Giant Hunter by Pascal Blanché

-16 inches tall
-Two interchangeable heads & two weapons.
-Two display bases.
-Hand-painted polystone resin, made in our own workshop.
-Art print, metallic collector card, deluxe collector art box and certificate of authenticity.
-780$ USD

Jaak is still available, in a limited edition of 400, hand-signed and numbered by Pascal Blanché.

You can also explore the rest of Pascal Blanché's work with House of Gog.

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Love ya,

Selina
House of Gog | Community Dev.
"Always the illest for the illests"