“Return of the Dragon” Custom Playful Gorilla x Tenacious Toys Banana Skinny DIY Cap

Custom one-of-a-kind Playful Gorilla x Tenacious Toys Banana Skinny Cap DIY vinyl figure, “Return of the Dragon”, for display and sale at New York Comic Con 2022.

From Tenacious Toys:

“The new Banana Skinny Cap DIY platform by Playful Gorilla is his stylized take on a classic. With a cool play on words, of course the Gorilla and Bananas are a perfect combo! The Banana Skinny Caps are a 5” tall customizable platform that come in a limited run of colors offering plenty of space and options for working with aerosol, airbrush, paint pens, stencils or even your favorite clay. The Banana Skinny Cap DIY is a giant-sized homage to the graffiti scene and all those giants that came before us.

• 5″ tall, 5.5″ wide
• vinyl
• polybagged with header card
• DIY white will be an open edition
• designed by Playful Gorilla
• produced in by Tenacious Toys”

When I heard the homies Playful Gorilla (Alex) and Tenacious Toys (Benny) were having a Banana Skinny DIY cap custom group show that will be for sale and displayed at the Tenacious Toys booth #1673 at New York Comic Con 2022, it was hard to stay in custom art toy retirement.  Alex and Benny are good people and even better friends, that I decided to come out of ‘retirement’ and do what I can to support them.  However I haven’t done a custom since 2018 (the “Danger Foo” figure) and with a little bit of time to get it done, I had to hustle and remember my customization skills!

The original design started as a vector made in Illustrator; the difficulty here was to design something to fit the shape of the art toy and had enough of it to go all the way around.  I decided on a Japanese dragon and adorned it with simple yet beautiful colors and backgrounds – circles and cherry blossoms. The paint colors are pearl blue, pearl green and pearl pink; pearl white eyes, teeth and claws; gold dragon; yellow for the hair and spikes; bright red for the belly; black for the scales and other accent pieces.

Unfortunately this piece did not sell at the con but will be up for sale online (or contact me).  This is a unique custom art piece that will not be reproduced by me, and I am not sure if I will make any more custom art pieces in the near future.  Thanks for checking it out!