P is for Playplax Plastic Play Pieces by Patrick Rylands

This is one of those nostalgia hits for people of a certain age, as if you didn't have them yourselves, you knew someone who did! In our case we never had these, but various other friends did, and they tended to be kicking around, but didn't get that much play, as we were older, as friends, and these were leftovers from earlier childhood.

I can't remember the exact date of this Sunday-supplement cutting, or the title, but they were a batch from mostly 1969-74'ish. The toy had won it's designer a Duke of Edinburgh's Prize for Elegant Design in 1970, among a tranche of other toys he, the Patrick Rylands of the post's title, had designed for Trendon Toys. He would go on to work with Ambi Toys in Denmark, not in the Tags yet, but I think there is something in the files for the A-Z entries!

 

He was - and I believe remains - the youngest ever recipient of the award for which the citation, as published in the June edition of the Design Journal that year, reads;

 

"The Duke of Edinburgh's Prize for Elegant Design 1970 has been awarded to Patrick Rylands for a range of toys designed for Trendon Ltd. The judges were impressed by Mr Rylands's creative approach to the design of toys and by his sustained contribution to toy design in the development of this range. They particularly commended the abstract qualities of the toys, which encourage children to use their imagination and introduce them to ideas of structure, form, colour and balance.

The best known of Patrick Rylands's toys is Playplax and this illustrates all the features which the selection panel praised. Playplax consists of simple tubes and flat squares of transparent polystyrene slotted so that they can be constructed in a multitude of ways. Red, yellow, blue, green ond clear pieces are included in each set so that children learn about colour combinations while exploring the wide variety of constructions which can be achieved."

 

He had originally designed them in ceramics, which he read at University (Hull and the Royal Collage of Arts), before creating these for Trendon in ABS/Acrylic, which was quickly replaced with polystyrene. There's plenty more on the internet, under Patrick Rylands or PlayPlax!

My own memories of them are mixed, I did have a few plays, the friend's samples tended to have lots of broken and cracked pieces, it was, in fact, far too easy to break them, either by forcing, or just sliding them together or apart at slight angles, and equally - they cracked easily.

 

As you can see from this shot, they were also quite wobbly constructions, that needed a flat surface, and steady hands, if one was to produce anything lasting and/or memorable! And actually, they had a pretty limited spacial-geometry, the tubes being far better for constructing substantial things, than the plates, which tended to spread quickly in space, without producing much of practical application!

Colours varied over the years, or between sets, and the one thing you can say for them is that they were colourfully eye-catching, especially when new and shiny! One US licensor (or pirate?), added triangles at some point which you see on evilBay from time to time, but what would have really given the line 'legs' would have been square or triangular tubes, like the round ones, or . . . and why did nobody ever do it, small joining clips, which would have allowed for long, flat runs, or side-by-side mounting?

 

The stuff is apparently still made, by Portabello Games, in the original colours and the original factory, still polystyrene (still brittle!) but no further innovation since the 'flower' pieces were added, or, are they knock-offs?

Instruction sheets from the first two sets, I don't know when the flowers' hit, but it must have been quite late, as you don't often see them in feeBay lots? And they may be a piracy thing, but I do seem to remember some of our mates having them in the larger samples?

Where they come into their own however, is in futuristic settings, think: Logan's Run, Babarella, or some of the early alien city's in Dr. Who or Star Trek! Not to mention half the props in Blake's Seven! Here I've managed a garage for space car number five! But it is huge, and you still have a very low ceiling!

 

Slightly more success with a rocket tower, but the inspection platforms are breaking all the rules of Playplax, being half-set at an angle and not locked in! But not too shabby for what was basically an infant's hand/eye coordination, 'early learner' toy.

 

There were the inevitable knock-offs, here made for a US 'jobber' (The Toy house), in the British Crown Colony (should we call it the long-term lease, now?) of Hong Kong. Pluses were more colours or - at least - different shades, minus were that they sometimes had different dimensions which either made them looser, or more likely to jam and split/break the not so cheap UK production ones!

T is for That Was My Idea, That Was!

Except it was Vic Reeves! And these aren't his at all! Something a little different tonight, these are my Lego improvement ideas, and they fall into two groups, those I sent to Lego back in the 1990's (before I knew they were the Evil Empire!), and those I probably didn't!

 

Sent to Lego

 

I can't now remember if it was before or after they had released their own footballer sets, I have a feeling it was after, they weren't very good in my opinion, and while I'm not saying mine were better, I was aiming for something more in line with the rest of the range, i.e. a carpet-play thing, more compatible with all the other Lego 'elements', as we are supposed to call a pile of Lego these days!

 

The most obvious difference was the attempt to make them look more like footballers in shorts & shirt-sleeves! And once I was looking at their sets and giving the whole thing some thought, the ball was obvious, as was a simple goal, using their own element rules, with the ball having their click-holes, so it could be used with other things in other colours, space sets, or ships mast radar-domes, while the goal is a glorified development of the fence/crash-barrier or roll-bar, both elements which had been around for years.

 

Further musings! I also thought a normal green baseboard (obviously in scaled-down pitch dimensions), overprinted with white lines, would be far better than the strange green chunks of their system (so it must have been after?), and while I provided alternate cross-sections for the bare arms/legs, the intention was to have them as the standard Lego 'rod' thickness, so they could grab each other in the goalmouth for a foul!

No, I'm joking, I was already, as with the ball, thinking ahead to circus clowns or acrobats, who would be able to grab each other's arms or legs, with their Lego hands (already set for the standard rod dimension), to build human pyramids or do tricks or something . . . they've never done Circus? They've never done a marching band?

 

My second idea, was so obvious I don't know why they've never done it, especially in the larger Primo or Duplo sizes. Alphabet or early-leading blocks, I mean, why the hell hadn't they done something so obvious? I sent these to them 25/30 years ago? And yet, as far as I know, they STILL haven't done them, or anything like them, despite the old printed bricks being among the better sellers in the vintage sets, we had it; HOTEL, GARAGE, TAXI . . . I can't remember the other two, you could light them from behind!

 

While my third suggestion was more of an exercise in getting studs onto the Insectoid wings, so more stuff could be attached to them. The actual range had transparent aqua-blue wings with few or no studs and a sort of printed-circuit design, and I just thought if they were studded, they could be given more robot 'stuff', like modern jets, or Stukas!

Probably not sent to Lego

I always thought the medieval range/Robin Hood sets could benefit from better detailing, and these are a few ideas along those lines. Mega Bloks already had sculpted-side elements in their range (as I was working on these), and the louvred-side 2x1 brick was eventually copied by Lego (slightly differently), but think how much better the current awful-AFOL architecture sets would be, or the Harry Potter sets, with better stone-mouldings?

 

I think they've done a hat like that now, the number of blind bag figures over the last decade and a half has produced all sorts of clothing and accessory elements, while the scarf was basically a variation of their own life-jacket, but the main idea was a single ski, and it's applications, they only do a sort of double thing which is unrealistically short?

 

Almost certainly not sent to Lego

 

A few more bits of medieval architecture, but I glued in an idea I literally had on the back of an envelope! Up until the 1990's, propellers in Legoland were pretty basic, there was a 2x3 tile with spigot for helicopters, or a 2x2 tile with a blunt-squared pointy bit at 90-degrees, and spigot for aeroplane wings, and a later, third version with an actual, small, grey propeller, rather than the studded-planks which had always been attached to the older two.

 

Now, at the time I was buying a lot of Lego from Car Boot sales, and damaged elements, after cleaning, would be cut, trimmed, shaved or melted back to a usefully usable 'new' or unique element, and this started life - I think - as the upper torso of an early Duplo figure.

I was trying to get it so that it would make a perfect, if generic, propeller for single seat planes like Spitfires or Cessnas! Or you could have four of them for a Fortress or Lancaster! Now - of course - they probably have much better propellers, and companies like Cobi and Airfix (Quickbuild) are making better Lego-compatible 'planes!

The bulk of the Lego went to 'Timpo' Dave in 2006/7? While the rest went to Johnny G's kids over a number of Christmases, all scrupulously split equally! And somewhere I have a nice "Thank you, but no-thanks' letter from some woman in Bilund . . . but they never sent the drawings back . . . dun, dun, DUN!

F is for Fatabet - the Slimfont of Self-indulgence!

Yeah, there'll be a few of these going forwards too; it's my Blog! We’re back to early ideas of mine which were fleshed-out when I got stuck into CAD, but this one goes back to my childhood, or - at least - teenage flirtations with design, and my attempt at an alphabet or font I originally called 'Fatabet', pronounced fat-a-bet, for obvious reasons!

The pages of my old sketch-book from collage, back in 1981-3, and my attempts to design an alphabet in which all the letters were contained within a circle; I think there were a couple in the 1970's; Lettraset did one with smiley-faced suns I think, but despite having both Lettraset and Mechaorama catalogues, I didn't crib from them (if they come out of storage I'll compare the closest, but they may have been lost in a flood back in 2007?), and sort of gave-up when I couldn't solve a couple of letters, the 'B' was one and the 'D' which still niggles!

However, CAD was an obvious opportunity to have another stab at the old idea, and I quickly got some geometric rules established and started playing around with the harder letters and some punctuation. You can see that 'B' (and 'D') along with 'Q' are coming out of the circle and I'm still not 100% happy with the first 2, the 'Q' however works, as it's already an odd-one!

I quickly used it for my signature block on all my drawing files/print-outs, and started thinking about other treatments; most fonts have a bold and italic version, so in playing-around I've ended up with several potentials!

And yes, the Fatabet got renamed Slimfont, although I know I could never use Fatboyslim, or Slimshady commercially, or not without passing many pieces of silver to two guys who probably have enough already!

Slimshady actually gave me the ultimate version (see below), while I don't think I named the one bottom-left, which ought to be Slim Outline but I already used Slimout for the standard font, so maybe Slim Jazzy?

Here we see CAD'ed versions of Slimwall (greenish) and Fatboyslim (multicoloured), which - latter - gave me the idea for a Christmas card I think I posted here at the time - 2012? With a construction stage at bottom left, before I'd positioned the light-source for the shadows, and at bottom right, my prepared design doubled for printing on A3 card-stock.

Which is here again! Well, it's only about six weeks away now! You use a single 'light' so the lines from the shadows, followed-back through the letters, all go to a single vanishing-point to enhance the 3D effect of the letters floating over the 'card' on the card!

And no matter how bad the year's been I hope over the next few weeks, your Christmas this year shapes up to be better than the last two - it can't just keep getting worse . . . can it?

Some other stuff, even in the digital age, it seems a lot of paper still finds its way into the project folder, not all of it explainable, but clearly I've started tackling the numbers and looking at font-size or kerning (ratios of gaps between certain pairs of adjacent letters) or something!??

I don't think I ever progressed beyond the numerals you can see here (left) or have even got to choosing a final from some of those where there are alternatives shown, but I was doing it in college-time and had other stuff to get on with.

Once I had a near finished alphabet (right) I moved on to other things and haven't got much further, I tweak something from time to time, but time's short these days, although I hope one day to put a finished version on a free-site like DAFonts.

One change you may have noticed is that the parallel line 'rule' established by the original 'A' and 'B' from my teenage version, which was carried on with the 'C', 'E' and 'F' (still not happy with 'D'!) and then taken through the whole alphabet, has now been dropped for 'W' following the enforced  'angle rule' for 'X' and 'Y', which I think makes it much better, the 'W' isn't just an upside down 'M', but a new letter in its own right!

Indeed you wonder if the reason all those angled letters are all at the back-end of the alphabet ('Z' is another) might be because when they were codifying it (monks? a Caesar?), they'd run out of strait and curved shapes/combinations which were suitably different from each other!

But back to Slimshady . . . once I was 3D CAD'ing more complicated solids than the pulled-out 2D of Fatboyslim, the obvious final progression was a fully 3D Fatabet (top right), which replaced my signature panel on the 'paper space' drawing files - main/left-hand image, taking the original circular disc concept to a full sphere.

New 'W' mind! The constriction of boolean geometries meant some simplification to get the curved ogee 'edges' to go-in properly! In simple terms, boolean means "Right, OR wrong, there is NO grey", and if your invisible mesh, underlying everything, has a single fault, the whole thing is 100% wrong!

I'm actually tackling a letter 'R' in the bottom-right shot and you can see how you pull-up the 2D 'R' (white lines), leaving you with an extruded, R-shaped rod (red lines), which you then subtract from a solid sphere (pink Lines) leaving you with a stable ball-letter, that then needs some sharp-edges rounding-off, which is where it can all go very wrong; if the continuous ogee (which runs right around the edges of each 'trench' or hole) won't go-in when told to!

For instance, the ogee running round the larger trenches in the 'H', have to have a greater radius than the smaller trenches in the 'W', which can affect the visual uniformity of the different letters in the alphabet, a uniformity which is precisely what I've been trying to achieve sine 1981! 'D' notwithstanding - the bastard, so; you have to compromise at each stage, but these two look OK together  . . . I think?

And . . . it's all good fun, that's the thing, it's another skill, it's another life-experience, you know? Another box ticked in an otherwise miserably short life. Parachuting is still on the list!

S is for 'The' Shark!

It's been a funny day, I awoke convinced it was Tuesday (so I got most of the right letters), but as the day progressed I sort of grudgingly admitted to myself in a sub-concious manner that it was Tuesday yesterday, so came to accept Wednesday as the day, only for someone to start announcing special programes for the Radio tomorrow, and the dawning realisation that a long weekend starts at midnight and if I wanted milk I'd better get my skates on and get to town!

Image courtesy of The News Elephant

So I don't know where the week's gone, but half of it snuck-by while I was doing something else! Anyway, what I was going to post at tea-time took a back seat, and, as I'd scanned these last night before their box went to storage, we'll have a bit of self-indulgence!

Back around '98, I had cause to design a shark, the main parameters being that A) it had to be executable on a vinyl-cutter and B) no one in the studio would show a mere fitter (for that is what I was!) how to use the CorelDRAW software! The irony there being that now I can 3D in Autodesk and the studio bods are probably still doing 2D signage!

The above are early efforts to 'get' a shark, not as easy as I'd thought it would be when I started, also - an additional parameter - I was trying to get there from the Christian fish, but sharks 'aint fishes! As you can see, far left bottom; I got closer to barracuda and tuna at one point!

Using the tracing-over-the-previous-image technique, a seven stage process lead to something I was happy with, although the final stage (with teeth) is missing, it must have been lost in the final scanning-to-PC and cutting phase, where I did get help from Jason in the studio and when the gills and eye were added from punctuation.

Once I was happy with the design, I had 12 printed-off in three colours, of which I have six left, the others having gone on various vehicles I have owned over the intervening 25 years . . . never mind this week, where the fuck has my life gone?!! Anyway, it became 'the shark' among my friends, and when I got a new vehicle it was always "You haven't put the shark on it yet then?"

In case you're still wondering . . . this was going to go on the opposite side of the boot/tailgate, but I never got round to finalising the design or getting it cut! It's alright; they raise again on the third day, apparently, although the way I'm counting days at the moment, that'll probably be next Saturday!

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

H is for Hungary

This is a collage of copyright free images (which doesn't mean you can use them 'as is' - the manipulated collage-image is (C) this blog) taken from a pre-war book issued by the Hungarian equivalent of the V&A or British Museum, and shows some of the items in their collection and archives.

It's hard to tell what size they are, I suspect about 50/60mm, and I'm not 100% sure if they are hand carved from wood, slate-cast 'traditional' lead flats, or zink-lead spelter castings? I suspect normal lead castings from slate moulds, but they seem to have a decorative purpose, rather than for use as toy soldiers so they may be spelter, and the detailing on the cavalryman's casting could be hinting at sand-casting. Meaning that they could be sand-cast, lead-based spelter from carved-wood pattern blocks? They're all in the tag list anyway!

The lady looks to be a little more fully-round, so a semi-flat (or demi-rond?), possibly with a flat back (I think they may all have blank rear faces), the other two are wood-cut patterns to work from. Uniforms of the three cavalrymen point to the 19th century.

Can anybody add anything else?

U is for Ugly Underside of Undulating UFO

Someone was asking about the underside of the flying NSDalek I CAD'ed a while back, this is for him, if you know CAD you'll understand, if you don't - please come back when I post something more interesting to you!

I filled the holes with blue 'glass' 5mil shorter than the cavity, and faced the cavities with an off-white light source, it looks better on a PC with a better graphics card, the Laptop simplifies the effect. H

P is for Petulant Pepperpot Peters-out Protesting Punishment

Well, it's sort of finished, and I've definitely put it to bed for now, these are both screen-captchas from my laptop, which while managing to handle the file-size without crashing like the studio machines, also leaves a bit to be desired in the resolution stakes, probably WHY it can handle the graphics - less info per inch!!

This was the final printout, it's a bit crowded for an A4/A3 sheet (we actually printed it in A3 and it's not too bad), but I'm hoping to get it printed A2 on the high street at some point, for the portfolio, and it's designed to show of a range of skills for a potential employer, who will hopefully realise that I can arrange things just as neatly with a little more room!! The grey box-lines and boarder shadows are a lap-top/Picasa thing, showing the hidden viewports?

The finished beast, not really 'finished' but I got enough detail into the breast-plate and toolboxes to con the casual observer, although I've just noticed the UCS is showing...doh!..Er...no...that's the new Dalek external temperature (red) air-speed (blue) and altitude (green) pitot, they're all having them fitted...now they can fly!

I am hoping to come back to it in a couple of months and attack the mid-section in 'Inventor' which may be a better tool for the sort of free-form shapes and intersecting arcs that make up the 'contours' of the shoulder area. But I am pleased enough with the final beastie to have bored you with it for the last couple of weeks! Back to toy soldiers....

S is for Self-indulgence

 No toys here...move along...nothing Toy Soldier...keep walking...next stop some other blog...

Still here? Oh well then, I'll try and explain, but really you need to have 'been there' or have to be familiar with the back-story, and I have to be careful what I say, because - unlike some of the staff involved - I don't want to libel or slander anyone.

So, certain things happened, some more stuff happened, I was exonerated in an internal investigation, certain other stuff then happened which was outrageous, I held my ground (with the help of my Disability Advisor and the County Psychologist [try spelling that when you've got bits of brain missing]), leading to a Chief Executive's No. 2 making an assurance that doesn't seem to have been kept, which all came down to my kicking my heels in the studio today waiting for nothing much else to happen as our tutor kept wandering off to 'meetings' - a dangerous thing to do with no cover and a studio full of adult students with 'issues'!

As a result, and because I'd taken all my files off and cleared the PC's history, cookies and the rest of that tedious stuff (registry mend, disc-clean, defrag, etc...), I was mucking about with Google, looking-up Photoshop blogs and AutoCAD tutorials on Youtube, when I put the following in to the search bar....

....and got bollocks up as the first result! Try it, it works, with or without the apostrophe! Like I said, you really needed to be there, just take my word for it, it's funnier than it looks to you - casual viewer! And a half-dozen visitors (by request) will - I suspect - be tickled. I also suspect if you put 'Google' in any random sentence you stand a good chance of getting bollocks, but then everyone knows that!!

Elf

While I'm being self-indulgent, and for the invited viewers in particular, this was done by my mate Jimijames (who sent me the too-cool email the other week), he was also treated pretty poorly by the same institution and is now 'doing it for himself'! If any design company in the Southhampton/Eastleigh area likes the look of this and has an opening for a trainee illustrator I can put you in touch. I think it's very good and given he was 2D Autodesking a few weeks ago, bloody good, but then you should see his free-hand black&white work, sublime.

M is for Merry Christmas

IT'S CHRISTMAS ! says Noddy five times a day on every radio station!

12 Days to Christmas, better get the tree up and start stuffing myself with stollen, tangerines, mince-pies, family packs of  'bisquits', Quality Street and  anything else I can lay my hands on that might get me in training for the big day!!!

So - I'm finally getting to grips with 3D and after a frustrating week on 'mesh' or basket-weaving as I call it, I had a bit of a play with 'solids' yesterday and lighting for shadows, so this is the first self-designed Christmas card wot I done did since primary skool init! More festive and less technical-exercise one next year I promise....

I still have all the Corgi/Matchbox articles to post and the French stuff, but time has waited for no man in what has been a very interesting year, however, I will try to get some catch-up done in the next four weeks.

Have a good one wherever you are and whoever you're with.

C is for Culcha' In'it, Ja'nowhat'a'meen Guyie!

Some more of the cultural referances to toy soldiers and model kits I've collected over the years...

Spin Collective Wall Stickers

Home Made I love these!

Melting Plastic Stefan Gross, and a Flikr album Here

He's Moved......from his bench!

More Wall Art Margaret Roleke's Barbie in a War Zone

Another Little Boat Some people do it so much better than James May!

There are still more to come...

C is for Cultural Combatants

Sometimes the heading is the hard part!...More Toy Soldiers seeping into the veins of wider society!

Skater Boys, Radical Man!

Hornets Nest...Don't poke it! They've got Armalites!

10,000 - But how many can you get in a 'Phone-box...and Here (with 'pop-up' you CAN kill!)

Nesting - Spring is sprung!

Toy Soldier, Vik Muniz...stunning, no?

Barricades...the best ideas are the simplest!

More soon...