About
Getting the likeness right
Everything rests on the likeness. Someone holding a four-inch figure recognises the face before they register anything else, and they will find every millimetre that is off. So the method is forensic: reference read frame by frame, skull before skin, the asymmetries that make a real face real, and the details nobody notices until they are missing.
Detail has to survive the process, too. A likeness that reads at full size but collapses at 1:18, or a surface that tooling cannot pick up, is not finished work. Most of what twenty-six years teaches you is what survives the mould, the shrink and the paint.
imagika began in February 2000 — a small sculpting studio in Surrey. The first commissions were Middle-earth: chess sets and figures sculpted from film reference before The Fellowship of the Ring had premiered, work that earned an invitation to the Leicester Square premiere and began a long habit of being trusted with unreleased worlds.
For most of two decades the studio’s staple was Eaglemoss: the entire 180-figure Lord of the Rings Collector’s Models run, the chess sets that followed, and the first sculpts of the Classic Marvel and DC figurine collections — hand-sculpted at first, then digital, with the Hobbit collection sculpted solo as the studio moved to ZBrush. When Eaglemoss closed in 2022, the work turned to sterling-silver jewellery masters and premium collector pieces for illustrated-book publishers.
The studio is just me now, and has been for sixteen years. If it needs form, likeness or material — physical or digital — I’m interested.
