ABOUT  ENCHANTICA

Part One
The Beginning - Holland Studio Craft

In October 1987 Andrew Bill joined Phillip Holland at Holland Studio Craft, little did they know at the time but around one year later they would introduce a little fantasy range called Enchantica!

At first Holland Studio Craft were producing small animal figures and When Andrew Bill joined he started making a range of little mice called “After the party mice” for the Natures Heritage range that HSC were then making.

Both Phil and Andy wanted to make a fantasy range and they looked into making a series of figures from JRR Tolkiens Lord of the Rings books because at that time no one had made any in resin but since the rights to the book were owned by an American film company it soon became clear that the cost was going to be far too expensive, plus the film company wanted complete control over the look of the pieces so the idea was quickly dropped, but the seed was planted.

Then one day while Phil & Andy were having a “business lunch” in the Swan Hotel in Stafford with their American distributor (and driving force) Doug Mitchell, president of Munro Collectables in the US, they heard Doug say “We’ve just got to do Fantasy!” and that was it! All they needed was to hear it from someone else. The seed had germinated,

Since Tolkien’s Characters were a no go area it was decided that the only way to go was for them to invent a new world for themselves, they didn’t want to take the easy route and just make a few dragons and wizards with no back story, they wanted to give the range some depth and do things professionally so it was given to Andy to write a story to go with the proposed range, he was asked to keep the story to around 26,000 words… the story (or part one at least) ended up being somewhat bigger at around 47,000 words. What he wrote was to become his first novel of four “The Wrath of the Ice Sorcerer” which became a best seller and introduced the world to Jonquil and his ever faithful companion Ratterjack along with many other characters that inhabited the world of Enchantica that would eventually see the light of day as resin figures so not only could you read about the characters, you could also own them.

So there you go, if it wasn’t for a meeting in a pub, eating steak and kidney pie, we may never have seen the likes of Enchantica.

Other Sculptors were brought in to help Andrew bring his characters to life and we saw Ken Fallon and Andrew Hull join the ranks along with head designer John J. Woodward and a very popular collectors club was introduced in 1990 which had a very friendly family feel to it.

The range was a huge hit with collectors who’d not seen anything like this before and in May 1991 the fantasy collecting world were stunned with the release of Andrew Bills “Flight to Danger” a huge dragon caught in flight that stood 22” tall and had a wing span of 2 foot, Country Artists the company who specialised in wildlife figures had produced large prestige pieces before that showed Owls and eagles etc... in flight or perched but nothing like Flight to Danger had been seen it the fantasy world and it was just a sign of things to come, Enchantica had now established itself as a leading force in the Fantasy figurine market.

The second novel “The Well of Hope” was released in December 1991 and brought us more characters to love and hate as well as hope that they'd also get made.

Things continued really well for a few years and also gave us one of the finest examples of fantasy art in the form of Andrew Bill's follow up to Flight to Danger, the magnificent "Avenger" which was released to to public in 1995 as part of the new Dragongorge range (a sub division of the Enchantica range)

To be continued...

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