F is for Fort Mavrick, without the E!

Heay! For years, they thought I was 'only' dyslexic! We had a group-project at Uni', where we had to renovate/rebuild/replace (the choice was rather ours, but front and back walls had to line up) a crescent, down near Elephant & Castle, and after weeks of individual project work, Design crit's, building crit's, more crit's and so on, we were required to place them altogether for the end-of-year exhibition, to which parents and the like were invited, which left us having to fill the empty corner with something, we whacked in a roundabout I think, and some formal beds, but I thought the kids who might live in our eclectic collection of . . . . dewllings (?) might like a play area, so this was born, literally overnight, as it wasn't part of the marking process!

The base was just a sheet of sandpaper! The whole thing got a bit warped in storage over the years, and realising I'll never be an architect now, it went on the fire back in 2016! I had no use for it, everything dies in the end, and at a scale of 1:50 it could really only be used by Space Marines, and they are too busy with Morlocks and Slitheens and suchlike, to find the time to relax on my wobbly rope & log bridge!

 

The two end pieces however, taken from old Hi-Fi equipment I think, or a TV set, are that compressed, die-cut hardboard I mentioned in the previous post. The one having bundles of wire directed through the holes, the other separating wires on the prongs . . . it must have been a TV!

 

There's a PC element to the construction, with no gates, easy access and the lookout accessible from the fort, but outside of it, although the leftie elements are balance by the fact that they could hurt themselves easy-enough, but - I like to think - in a non-terminal, character-building sort of way!

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!

A is for Apparently . . . .

 . . . it's national thesaurus day, somewhere!

 

"I successfully predict that upon which you cogitate; did I empty the ammunition storage chambers, or only partially expend their contents? And - should you wish to be appraised of the facts - in all the preceding, heated kerfuffle, I appear to have purely failed to register that data? Therefore, the quandary with which you have to present yourself, is thusly - Do you feel blessed with good fortune, juvenile delinquent? Verily, comment upon that?"

"The pinnacle of the planetary sphere, mother, the pinnacle of the planetary sphere!"

 "The advancing object is in no way a Luna body!" . . . "It's a moment of captive deceit!"

"It's a form of existence, Jim, but in a manner we would not comprehend it as, in the normal course of events."  

"May the measure of nonequilibrium accompany you, adolescent Skywalker!" 

B is for Bookplates - 5 - Mine

Some of you will be pleased to learn this is the last of these . . . for now; we will return to them in the fullness of time, along with the previously mentioned book-marks, one of which, a novelty polymer one, came in with a mixed-lot this afternoon!

So having been introduced to bookplates at a young age; 6 or 7 maybe, and knowing Mum had one, I had a hankering for one as I began to accumulate books myself, in my teens, when I was also visiting Thomas Thorp's myself, as a customer, on my way to and from Art Collage!

 

And these sketches date from that time (1981-3), I was actually working on an/my graphic interpretation of Celtic artwork, quite the hippy! These were in part for a Tattoo I never actually got done! Something which ironically pleases me now, given that every other buggers' got them, they've rather lost their cache, in their commonality.

 

You can see there's a bit of 'Slimfont' work going on as well, and a simplified version of the dragon ended-up on my carved tile, might-be-Roman, coaster.

This is where it would lead about 15 years later, these are a few colour studies I did on some photocopies, in various sizes, with my treasured magic markers - long since dried-out. Colour really doesn't work on bookplates, I don't know why, but they almost demand to be left understated! If I had to use one in would be the browns on the right, I'm a sucker for Autumnal colours!

 

Working out the layout and lettering, clearly 'slimfont' wasn't far away once I'd gone with the circles or bubbles concept! And my middle initial 'D' was dropped as it was going to obscure the tail . . . yeah, it's an embryo!

 

The two scraps of paper top-centre look like they might be the margins of 'Model and Collectors Mart'! Long-gone now I think!

 

I don't know what I was doing here, the cut-outs are presumably because I thought about reversing the image (no computer still! '97-98?), while the larger image (actually the same size as both the cut-outs and the tracing) might have been half-an-idea for a sundial?

The little blue sketch may be the first version, but therein lies the problem with the whole design, I eschewed the designs which used the tracing of rights-free stuff, and commercial lettering, for something wholly my own work . . . for my own bookplate; makes sense, right?

But . . . one of the books I bought at Thorp's, back in the nineteen-eighties, was the English-language, full-colour version of Frenchman Philip Druillet's Lone Slone/Delirius, published by Dragon's Dream, and, on the large, double page spread of his lovemaking with some universal god-head's daughter/princess (or something, I can't check as it's in storage), there are a bunch of bubbles and planets and stuff at the top of the page/panel, including something looking suspiciously like this?

 

And there is issue; there is a child produced by the union, it is being conceived in the panel-image, so it is an embryo! Now it would be wrong of me to claim this is an original, if it's derivative of the master's work!

 

In my defence, at art collage you are taught to sketch anything you like, anything that takes your fancy, something which was only reinforced many years later when we had to visit museums and produce copious works of what we saw, while at university as a mature student. After all, the great architect Santiago Calatrava is known to have based his overhead rail gantries on a sketch of a bull's head!

Now when I was working on the bookplate, I was sure I was dealing with a funny little sketch of a planet or something, and while I decided it did indeed look like an alien embryo and, if developed along those lines, would have connections to the embryonic ideas that come out of reading &etc . . . I also have to face the fact that by subconscious accident or forgetful design, I probably ripped-off Mr. Druillet! Hay-ho, I'm stuck with it now and it's stuck into thousands of my books!

But it's only stuck into the art/architecture/design and collectables/modelling/wargaming libraries, so I may return to the old designs, or make a new one altogether, when I get the rest plated-up in the next few years.

 

Perhaps one of the Oriental ones (previous-but-one post) could be used for my late mother's library of oriental art, ceramics and persian carpets, with a new one (I have half an idea for one with a rabbit in the bottom left corner and a distant warren in the background, top-right) for the natural sciences? And I'll need one for the History/military books? I wouldn't use bookplates for fiction, I find it an ephemeral art!

Oh, and if you find this bookplate in either of Michael Maughan's 1st or 2nd volumes of the Timpo guide, the Great Book of Corgi OR any of the Hornby Companion series (landscape hardbacks), they are mine, and the person who has them - shouldn't have, I think some may be in Colorado, if not they are long gone as the other suspect (and there were only ever the two) is dead! But the books are still mine!

B is for Bookplates - 4 - Drafts

We arrive at my efforts! It took me a while to get round to doing a bookplate for myself, although there were half-hearted attempts at them when I was a teenager, those efforts are somewhere in the storage unit!

Here I've copied some stuff, a woman, and some graphics from Mecanorma and/or Lettraset catalogues, which I've enlarged, in order to better trace those elements I wanted to use/transfer to the draft design.

 

Now, I can't for the life of me remember how I arrived at these coloured copies of the lady, or where she came from? At that time I had no copier, no computer . . . and the corner shop's photocopier might have had an enlarge feature, but I don't remember it being a colour machine, nor do the Lettraset and Mecanorma (French equivalent of Lettraset) catalogues have any colour artwork, as far as I can remember?

 

These sketches will date from around 1997/8, and I just don't know how I had the ability to produce these working scraps, but clearly I did! And having done so, got to work on them . . .

 

. . . first by reversing the image, and again; how? No feature like that on a photocopier? No computer until 2007? How can one totally forget a whole process? I normally have a very good memory (it's one of the features of Asperger's), but this is all a blank!

 

Anyway, you can see how I was going to join the two girls hair together to make the outer frame of the design, while on the right I'm using tracing-paper to lift some of the dry-transfer elements and try to bring them together in a more unified structure, I've drawn some new hair in, having traced her without her hair.

But again adding to the mystery, the two girls in the left-hand image have had all their lines go A) very broad and sausage-like, and B) there's a negative, white-space, thing going-on where the lines cross . . . I do have a vague memory of that being a negative-feature of the enlarging process, maybe I had help producing the preliminary materials from the studio guys at the sign fitting company I was working at.

 

They had Adobe, I think, matched with CorelDraw? Probably running on Windows 95? If she's a rights-free piece of clip-art, it would have been easy for Jason or Matt to enlarge, reverse one, and print them off for me?

 

However, I seem to have lost interest in a naked, fantasy princess bookplate, quite quickly and moved on to something more oriental, again using tracing to take images from a rights-free, images portfolio, which I'd bought from the previously mentioned Thomas Thorpe's in Guildford, many years earlier while at art collage!

 

And yes, that's a typo, but it took me until I was today-year's-old to realise it is Mecanorma, not Mecanorama . . . classic word-blindness! Googling Mikado as a typeface leads to a kids-friendly 'chunky' design and a couple of bog-standard and rather boring sans-serif types, which wouldn't have interested me then or now.

But, I did find a seller on Etsy who has a few sheets of the Mecanorma original for sale, and you can see that the note (on the back of the design - you can just see it through the paper) was pointing to a nice oriental typeface for which to produce the 'Ex Libris' and/or any name.

 

Meanwhile, this design had also been taken to, if not a near finished stage, at least a stage where you could see what the final design would look like? It may even have come before the one above - it has a certain air of abandonment about it?

 

I guess I would have been looking for a bamboo effect letter type? And no; I have no idea what happened or was due to happen on the 22nd, nor indeed, which month, but again, 1997 is a safe bet, or 1998!

I may return to these and get them finished as commercial prospects in a year or two, these days there's plenty of places like evilBay and Etsy to shift this kind of bespoke stuff, and production costs have come right down with home-computing, desktop publishing and the like, and I think there's a ream of licky-sticky paper in my stuff somewhere, but it may be a solid brick by now!

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

D is for Deetail Details!

Sorting stuf out in Picasa and din't know which of the previous posts to add this image to, so though it might as well go here!

Just a comparison between the earlier silver and later Black Storm mounted Deetail Knights from Britains. The later one having the marginally more realistic appearance...apart from the chrome shield!

Also found this unused graphic I CAD'ed-up during the original series of articles, on the Britains dongle when putting the images away...just for fun...or something!

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....

LFA is for Low Flying Alien!

We always knew they could! Well...they did in the old movie didn't they, and one of the annuals! I finally got the chest/shoulder block and - specifically - the little plates of 'armour' to look half decent, it's still not finished, but after the best part of two weeks, it's looking good! It should be - it's given me several 'ice-cream' headaches and crashed the studio PC four times!

I need to do a lot of chamfering to the various shelves that run round the mid-section, but AutoCAD has decided not to let me do that now, nor will it let me put in fillets as a cheat, so now I know I can do it I may go back and do it again, after getting the chamfers done first.

I still need to sort out the chest piece, which still needs a couple of bolt-heads and a cut-out. At some point the two tool/weapons have come forward of their boxes "...while I wasn't looking your honour!" and will need to be pushed back, and the same boxes need little angled cut outs on the flat outer side, but otherwise well pleased with it and it's as far as I can go on this course really, so I need a job with a firm that will push me further...I can relocate?!!