Toy's Art in SecondLife and All Over

Important News

On February 28th, 2016, Toy received the greatest honour to date on his journey as an Artist!
Toy was awarded the 2016 SecondLife Avi Choice Award for Favorite Artist !

Considering the massive pool of fine arts Artists in SecondLife and that this award is the broadest of the 53 music, arts, dance categories (covering almost all fine art genres), even being nominated is an honour. To win the award is a humbling milestone in Toy's life. When he started his journey as an Artist in 2010 he would NEVER have imagined winning an award such as this. Toy thanks all of you that nominated and voted for him. Truly an honour!

Artist Background

In April of 2010, Toysoldier Thor officially caught the "Secondlife° PhotoArt" addiction. Prior to that, Toy had been using the basic features of Photoshop for many years as a tool to create both real life commercial works to serve his business and later for his successful Landscape Sculpty Store in SL. His inspiration to use Photoshop in more artistic ways by manipulating SL photos came from his admiration of the amazing artworks of an SL friend.

Through 2010 Toy created a large portfolio of art using SL photographs as a base. His growing passion took him into other forms of art including Real Life photography, mixing SL and RL textures/subjects, and 3D & digital painting. He founded a group at the DeviantArt website called Secondlife-Photoart with a solid membership. He also began transitioning some of his artworks into marketable pieces both in SL and in RL. He has printed some of his art into large format giclee canvas prints in real life.

In February of 2011, Toy decided he needed a proper home for his portfolio of Art in SL. He designed and built his own Gallery. His first gallery filled up fast so Toy rebuilt a larger and yet more stylish gallery. On July 17th, 2011, Toy opened of this new gallery with 50 art works on display. Then on July 30th, 2012, Toy moved his Art Gallery to his new larger land at the LAFEW sim and merged it with his large sculpty landscapes store.

Toy's persona has always matched his nickname - a playful yet passionate TOY. As such, his art tends to reflect a lot of his passion to experiment with several ideas in art.

Many artworks in landscapes shows his love for capturing natural views & nature scenes - explains why his main SL business is creating SL LANDSCAPE Sculpt Maps for sim builders.

He also has a large compliment of emotional works that express some powerful symbolic messages.

In 2012 Toy began developing 3D Mesh art sculptures for SL. Many of his works are of abstract humanistic forms expressing emotions from via the body form. He follows up all his mesh sculptures with a 2D artistic rendition of the sculpture as he believes it allows him to further extract the story from the sculpture by using textures and a setting.

Not ever being satisfied, in July 2014 Toy took on his most ambitious art challenge as part of this on-going quest to transform SL art to RL art. He had already accomplished SL 2D wall art to RL canvas. Now he wanted to transform SL 3D mesh statues to RL bronze castings. He completed his goal May 1, 2015 when he received from the foundry his first 13 bronze cast editions of "SHATTERED".

(click to enlarge)

Not only was this a first for Toy, it was also a milestone for the virtual world of SecondLife as no known SL Artist had previously ever transformed an original SL mesh art sculpture into a RL bronze casting.

Of the 13 cast editions, Toy had pre-sold 10 of them to followers of his art in SL and RL. The most notable to join Toy's journey and purchase one of the 1st bronze casts was Ebbe Altberg, CEO of Linden Lab Inc. This edition of Shattered was put on display at the Linden Lab head office.

All Toy's works in his SL Gallery are available for purchase as MOD / TRANSFER SL Prims and include a detailed Artist's Comment Notecard.

Toy maintains a presence in many of the SL art communities most popular Internet photo and artwork websites. Following is a short list of the sites where he maintains a presence: