B is for Blobby Blobby!

No, not the dying-pig screeching, pink, polka-dotted product of early-evening televisual entertainment for the Morlocks and Yahoos, but a pet project of mine which was five years in the gestation/completion and has sat in a folder doing nothing since (another eight years!), so this could also be S is for Selfindulgence!

It started with a sketch, I had thought that you could have a chess set where the pieces were simply letters identifying the role of the piece, P for Pawn being the starting point, I then extruded the King to denote his seniority - despite the original idea being small flat magnetic 'travel chess' pieces -  before I knew where I was going I had abstracted the Bishop (B), gone back to the Pawn, had another go at the King (top, and top-right), designed all their plan profiles (bottom-left) and got a Mk1 Pawn - bottom right.

New sheet of paper; and designs I was happy with were quickly thrown-up, they aren't all the final designs, but the base was pretty-much decided upon and the idea of fluid lines and abstract designs were established, I was aiming for something between sand-blasted wood, and those turd-towers you make on the beach by dribbling very wet sand through your fingers. Well, some of us did!

Some of you will already have spotted an obvious mistake, but like walking away from a crossword puzzle and returning to it to get the clue you're stuck on, or after the 'Can't see the wood for the trees' aphorism, it took me (and the various tutors/fellow students involved in the below images) until preparing this article to spot it, so I'll save admitting it to the end!

I then modeled working prototypes in air-drying clay; the king's a bit droopy! I only have this low-res' crop out of a larger image of the old 'Cabinet of Curious Things', but a few years later I would be off on the CAD course, and these became a step on the way!

Pretty-much as the clay ones but the Castle now wears a simplified version of the King's crown, and the Knight has lost his bulgy-eyes for little pin-pricks which only hint at a face, the bishop gets a deeper valley between finer sides to his mitre-hat. This is still a 2D flat space drawing, coloured with a gradation tool in the lower image to give a false appearance of 3D.

Chees Set! Heay; they're working drawings in cyberspace! It's an idea though, with that plastic American cheese - you could injection-mould them and once the game was finished (pawns/queens) you could eat them with crackers and a nice wine!

When manufacturing a Staunton set for competition, the factories spend longer hand-carving the Knights (4 pieces) than they spend producing the rest of the set (28 pieces), and you can't begin to make Knights until you have been at the factory for several years and have mastered all the other pieces.

It was a bit like that with my Knight in the end, instead of lathe, saw and blade, I had the Boolean commands of extrusion, union, and subtraction, but it's a messy business while it's happening! I won't bore you with a detailed explanation of the steps but the main one is to pull out the whole profile (a), and the width of the head (b), subtract them from each other to get (c), which you then tweak with a standard base!

In the end I added a mane (of sorts) and the final piece works I think? I know some abstract, graphical or 'space-age' chess sets have Knights which don't look like 'knights', but in the end I felt a little homage to Jacques was in order!

I don't seem to have replicated him four times and coloured him properly for these screen-shots but you can see how he'll slot-in and I think the overall works, the idea is to get it on one of the 3D printing sites, it'll be free, I can't see demand making it commercially viable and if it's free you can forget it once you've uploaded it!

But he is here in this outline screen capcha'. The 'deliberate' mistake . . . I've got the King and Queen the wrong way round, the nipple should be the King and taller, while the rubber-glove full of air should be the Queen, and shorter! It's an easy job to switch them, but fancy not noticing for what's been 13 years since the first sketch! Anyway, I think it works and it'll give the haters something else to hate!

Copyright Hugh Walter ©2009-2022