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!

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

A is for Archive Material

I had a fancy a while ago (26-years ago according to the drawing) to send some stuff to the readers hints page of a modelling magazine, and knocked this up as a first attempt! Needless to say I never sent it - application is not an aspergics' strong point, we're good at ideas, not so good at applying them!

I drew it on blue graph paper as blue used to be lost in the reproduction process for plans and drawings, although; why I thought a modelling magazine would have thermal blue-print equipment is anyone's guess, but as technology has - in any event - moved-on somewhat, it's now stuck with the hundreds of blue lines being read digitally, although I'm pleased to see most of the Tippex (another near-dead tech'!) seems to have faded-out in the scanning, so you win some - you lose some!

Also it's not so much a conversion or modelling-tip, as a graphic explanation of a bodge! It used to wind me up, just putting the tracks on a new kit was often enough to snap the drive-sprocket or idler-wheel (or both!) cleeean-orrff! So I got to the point where I was doing this with new kits as I constructed them from the box. I don't know if it was my imagination, but I seem to recall Airfix was the worst offender, with Esci a close second!

For the replacement axle in part 4 I used sections of plastic tooth-pick, it was stronger than Evergreen or similar polystyrene strips/'polyrods' Also; see, I used to use the term 'sprue' for runners!

This Russian KV 'Heavy' from Esci (a nice, neat, clean little kit) needed the rod-trick on the rear sprockets (and I should have done the front at the same time!) but because it was done before the deck went on for the last time, you'd never know it.

I notice it's lost an MG in the move, there is quite a bit of damage in the kit cabinet, one of the guys helping me tipped it on its back (because he'd seen the danger of the drawers falling out) and all the whitemetal and resin kits rather crushed the plastic ones as they shot back! I have a few nights gluing in my immediate future!

I also did this to explain the way I made the spare magazines for my quadruple flak, another project which hasn't progressed beyond the state it was in when I shoved it on the Blog! But I do now have two of those Frozen sleighs to add to the final diorama - if I ever go back to it?

Just use a set of dividers to score-out a circular strip, but before you cut through the two outer rings do some shallower ones inside them, which will pick-up paint and look like the reinforcing stampings on the originals. To fit them into the kits magazine-slots you have to remove the two shaded areas.

If they are going in the racks at the base of the gun, paint the top ends brass (for ready ammo'), if they are being littered about on the ground paint one end black (for an 'empty' shadow).

On the left are seen the commercial magazines on an Esci Flakpanzer kit, on the right homemade ones on an AHM (Hasegawa) half-track, they are not brilliant, I wasn't doing any measuring, it was all rather 'by eye', but you get the idea!