Why did start making artisan key I've been collecting artisans for a while, but didn't quite think about the roles Chinese artisan makers have been playing in the market until last year.China does not have many impactful artisan makers like other countries. Mubai, as a rising star, has fantastic sculpts and craftsmanship; bob keycaps and mmartkeys, as two successful pioneers, are still role models for to look up to. Nowadays, I can hardly see any popular sculpts based on Chinese culture. It seems most collectors prefer something cute or anime themed. However, I would like to try making something more innovative and meaningful rather than following the market. The sculpt that I am currently working on is called Yama, who is in charge of Sheol - Hell in traditional Chinese culture. He dictates the Samsara in Sheol. In traditional Chinese myth, people are taken to the underworld to accept the trial of the Yama after death. Those who have done good things in their lives will be sent heaven to enjoy happiness, whereas those evil ones will be punished and sent hell to suffer. Death also means a new cycle of life. Before a soul is sent to reincarnation, it must pass through a bridge called Naihe bridge, where an old called Meng Po gives every soul a bowl of soup to erase their memories Nuwa, an ancient god, is the one who assigned Meng Po there. All these constitute a complete set of reincarnation systems of the Sheol in Chinese myth. In Chinese mythology, Yama originated in India, and he was the first person that died. After localization, Yama is both a ghost and a god. His two eyes can tell whether you are lying. For the West, many people think that the god of death is their version of Yama. In fact, this is not the cast: the god of death only emerged in the modern era. The image of the god of death is mainly derived from Kronos in Ancient Greek myths, and he punished his father with a sickle. The sickle is his symbol, and the appearance of the god of death means death is coming. It is more similar to the Black and White Impermanence in Chinese traditional myth. They work for Yama. Thus, Yama is more like Hades. I, as an artisan maker, would like to use my sculpts as media to introduce Chinese culture. Another area I would like to explore is the application of Cubism in the artisan. However, I will leave that part for the next time.
Product Everything starts with this sketch. We made the prototype sculpt based on this sketch. Since he is the king of Sheol, the sculpt itself must demonstrate the aura of a dominator. We tried our best to depict our attention to detail. For instance, you can have your own understanding of its tongue and the details around it. We want to give details while leaving some artistic interpretations for the sculpt. Because of the capacity of how many details a keycap can possibly have, we have to create a second version to balance the details. My friend Mori made a cute version and experienced various proportions on each part. Finally, we finished the first official draft of Yama v1 after the negotiation among our team. We chose to apply larger eyes along with more selective details on the sculpt. We added earrings and reduced the number of teeth, and the horns on the head are also thicker to become more eye-catching. The flame on the forehand represents the symbol of Yama’s power in the Sheol. After all the adjustments, Ding started his sculpting process. This process was indeed a big challenge for him. After all, the previous tests were on a relatively large scale, and he needed to maintain the overall proportions of the shape while making it at the scale of a keycap. The photo below was the first physical trial. After this trial, I decided to discard most of the details, and only kept the key elements on the face. Thus, Ding made a second trial. You can see the sculpting process and outcome in the following photos. Overall, it is better than the first trial, but the eyes are not big enough, and they are not vivid enough. The face is a bit unsure whether it is round or square. Teeth are a bit small, and the size of the entire keycap is a bit too large. Because we want to make our project the best we can possibly achieve, we decided to refine and modify it again in accordance with Mori's suggestions this time. However, the modification eventually ended in failure because the old version almost became obsolete to reuse. After several discussions, Ding decided to make another version to adjust the overall proportion. Based on Mori's suggestion, we got the original final version. After rounds of optimization and polishing, final version finished. we have 2 version, one is mirror eyes with polished body（TypeA）, and another have matte finish（TypeB）.
TypeA
TypeB
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Details:
Member TN（Triple Night） THE CASTER-A guy always want to do something different. M（Mori） THE COLORMASTER AND ILLUSTRATOR-A freelance painter. D（Ding） THE SCUPLTOR-Want to do something serious.
How to get it I sincerely hope that I can make enough artisans to meet market demand (assuming people are interested in our products). Unfortunately, all three of us have jobs in the daytime, so the time left for making artisans is not very sufficient. We work overtime at night to complete all the processes including design, making, packaging, and shipping. As we treat it as our hobby, we do not want to put too much pressure on each other. So TNKaps will never do any GB in the future. Based on this, there are only ten (10) in each sale in order to ensure that each keycap meets the highest standards for its quality. I hope all of them can find their permanent homes. For the sake of fairness, we would like to raffle them. We may need 1-2 weeks to prepare each raffle, and it really depends on how much spare time we have. After all, I have a four-year-old kid that needs to be taken care of.
-Sale Link：https://www.instagram.com/tn.kaps/ The raffle link will be in my bio when it goes live in 2 days -10 piece -$85 usd/one piece -All Caps are Cherry MX -Shipping to Chinese Mainland is free -Shipping anywhere else is $12 -TypeA or TypeB deceided by RNG God（5/5） -All Caps will ship in 2 weeks
For more sales details, please follow the Instagram link above.
