The Office- Throwing A Garden Party

I made up a copy of Jim’s fake book from the Office Episode ‘Garden Party’.  Feel free to print it off and keep it with your Dundee Certificate.  Just don’t sell it.

Garden Party

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Brady Bunch Tiki – NEH NE NEHHHH

Latest prop replica is none other than the Brady Bunch “Cursed Tiki” from the three episode arc where the family visited Hawaii.

While away on vacation, the Brady boys were exploring a construction site when Bobby found a small carved statue, or tiki, half buried in the dirt.  He cleaned it up and wore it on a leather necklace as a good luck charm.  Little did he know that from that moment, the bearer of the Tiki was cursed!

That night, while sitting on the bed, Bobby was almost crushed by a heavy falling shield.  Later, Peter was attacked by a giant deadly tarantula.   Later, Alice hurt her back and Greg was almost drowned while surfing!

Hilariously, every time someone was hit with the bad luck effect, the camera would zoom into the Tiki and a particular sound would play.  “NEH NE NEHHH!”

My replica is a really nice resin cast, which I painted with a black undercoat.  Over time I dry brushed it with a light ivory colour to build up the detail.  I gave it a few brown washes along the way to simulate dirt in the grooves after it had been buried.  Once it was done I attached a leather cord so it could be worn.

Also, the TV show Scrubs had an episode called “My Soul On Fire“  where two of the cast got Tikis and wore them throughout.   The Tiki on that episode is not the same as the proper Brady Tiki featured in that series.  Sorry Scrubs Fans.

Click the links in the text for the Scrubs Tiki and part of the Brady Bunch episodes.  You can watch the full episodes on Youtube if you like.

The day I finished my Tiki I found my car has a leak in the radiator.  NEH NE NEHHH!

Construction Site	Brady Tiki	Scrubs Version
Unpainted	Tiki	Tiki

Myth Busted!

While I was working on my bolter (see last entry) and waiting for it to dry, I started another small project which will eventually test my painting skills in preparation for the bolter paint job.   I found a decent font at www.dafont.com called “Alias” and printed off a template, then cut it out of foam core left over from the bolter build.

Mythbusters sign!

I’m not sure how it will turn out, but I’m going to try it anyway.  It’s only about 50cms long, which is fine for my display purposes.   As I said, it’s mostly so I can test my painting skills and attempt a realistic looking rusted and damaged metal finish on something that isn’t actually metal.  I eventually want to play around with resin casting, so this might end up coming out in resin.  Once again, I’m just messing around and having fun with it. I haven’t really thought about it long term.

Here’s a progress picture-

M.Y.T...

Actual Logo

Space Marine Bolter – Pt2

Got up early this morning and went to Officeworks to buy the gear to make most of my Bolt Gun. The shell is foam core, a double sheet of plastic with a layer of Styrofoam pressed in between. It’s strong, but easy to shape. They had single sheets for $9.50, but I find on a high shelf a couple of 5 packs. I had the guy check the price and they were $9.50. Naturally I bought the 5 pack. I’m not sure what was going on with that, but I got a good deal.

I headed into work and started planning and cutting, eventually turning out the main components. Some of the cuts are a bit unsteady, but its my first time working with the foam core, and this type of thing in general. I dare say I’ll have a lot of patching up to do, but the main body is looking OK. I have no idea when I will get to do some more work on it. Maybe a couple of nights at work. I can’t do it at home, I just don’t have the necessary table space. Anyway, here’s the story so far:

Stage Two

Space Marine Bolter – Pt1

I got the idea to make a Space Marine bolter.  Space Marines are characters from the Games Workshop Warhammer 40000 universe.  Big, genetically modified humans living in the 40th millennium, the Space Marines defend humanity against the threat of aliens, and the mutated powers of Chaos.

Wearing huge suits of armour, the main weapon of the Space Marine is the bolt gun, or bolter.  A machine gun that fires rocket powered bullets, the Bolter is a powerful force on the futuristic battlefield.

Creating a Bolter will be a massive challenge for me.  I haven’t done anything like it before.  The idea is to create it from foam core, which is a light piece of foam sheeting layered with card.  It should be easy to cut and shape, and yet strong enough to hold its form.  I’ll tape it together and glue it with epoxy, then hopefully fill the insides with expanding foam or something.   Maybe once it’s done I’ll cast it in resin or something.  That’s a whole other skill set I don’t have yet, and I haven’t really thought that far ahead.

I’ve drawn up some plans to cut it out by, and made a miniature paper model to see how it all fits together. The sticking point at the beginning will be the handle.  I’ll take a look in some toy shops tomorrow to see if I can find a toy gun I can butcher to make a nice handle base.   Toy guns are pretty hard to come by around here though, especially ones of a decent size.   I might have to sculpt it out of board and shape it with putty or something.  I really don’t want to do that though.   Anyway, here’s a couple of pics of the small-scale paper model.

40K Marine	Paper Bolter
Paper Bolter Assembled

Get Out Of Hell

Yet another show that died before it’s time was ‘Reaper’.  It was about a young guy who finds out that when he was a kid his parents sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for some favours.  Come his 21st birthday, Sam (Bret Harrison) finds out that the Devil has come to collect, and he makes Sam his bounty hunter.  Each episode follows Sam’s adventures as he and his friends hunt down souls escaped from Hell.  It’s actually a comedy and it was a pretty good one.  Sadly it was dropped by the network after only a couple of seasons.

In one of the early episodes, the Devil (Ray Wise) gives Sam a “Get out of Hell Free” pass, which he can use at any time in the future to escape his fate.

Since it plays a pretty big part in a couple of the episodes, and it just looks cool, I figured I’d have a go at making it.  Print it at standard business card size, and on red card for the best effect.

TV Screenshot 1

TV Screenshot 2

My Version (enlarge)

Because I’ve Got A Golden Ticket

As you know, paper props have been my main interest lately, and I made up another one recently.  You may remember the movie Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, or the terrible remake with Johnny Depp, “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” a few years ago.   If not, it was about a crazy confectioner named Willy Wonka, who held a competition for the people of the world to visit his super-secretive factory so that the best of the applicants could take over when he passes away.  To find worth candidates, he releases five golden tickets in his chocolate bars and whoever finds them gets to tour the factory.  The children are all terrible, hideous people with the exception of Charlie, a kind-hearted boy from the poorer side of town.

I’ve always liked the first one and so I hunted around for some source images and gradually put together a decent copy of the ticket that I could print at a nice resolution.  While I’m 100% happy with the ticket itself, I’m not so happy with the printed version.   In the film, the ticket looks to be some sort of gold foil, with the words stamped on.  Because I’m limited to my inkjet printer, printing on foil isn’t an option.  I tried, and it was a disaster.  The ink won’t stick, and that which does stay on the foil fades away to nothing in a few hours.  So, heading off to Officeworks I bought some gold printer paper and tried again.  It’s good for what it is, but it’s not the gold foil I wanted.  Maybe at some point I’ll find a place that can do foil stamping and try again.  The ticket looks good, but only if you don’t really compare it to the screen-used one too closely.

Sorry about the horrible picture, it doesn’t photograph well.

Golden Ticket

Debra Morgan ID Badge

I got bored and decided to put together a Debra Morgan ID card.  Print it at 2.5″ x 3.35″.

Click for the Printable Version

Paper Props

Paper props are items such as business cards, letters, maps and so forth seen on tv shows or movies.  There are so many paper props out there that it’s kind of like a prop collector’s sub culture.  Take for example, the Back to the Future movies.  In that, you have several paper props that play key roles in the film.  For example-

• The photo of Marty’s family that disappears over time
• The flyer for the clock tower that Jennifer writes her number on for Marty
• The photo of Doc back in the Wild West
• The Letter Marty gives Doc telling him he’s going to be shot
• The Sports Almanac

…Ok you get the point.  That’s just from one movie.  Most movies have at least some kind of paper prop.  These are my new passion.  You’ve already seen my maps in earlier posts and I’ve talked about pepakura models previously as well.  I’ll show you some of those in my next entry.   For now, I’ll post up two paper props I made myself just yesterday.  Feel free to print them as you like. Just don’t post them on Ebay or something. Keep them free.

First up, Santa’s business card as seen in the Tim Allan Christmas movie, The Santa Clause. It has the tiny print around the border that is the actual ‘clause’.  Print it double-sided on card stock so you have the “ask the reindeer” text on the back!

The Santa Clause

FRONT

BACK

Second up is Dexter’s ID card from the magnificent Dexter series.

Dexter & Doakes

ID Card

For best effect it should be placed in one of those leather police neck chains they wear in the show.  You can get a close match here if you like.

Computer, Idol Map & Tolkien Hobbit Map

Finally, I’ve got the new computer and can get on with finishing some of my projects.  The computer arrived in two huge boxes, and actually didn’t take  very long to set up.  Windows was already installed so I simply had to register it and begin the tedious process of installing all of my own programs, games and so forth.  It took a while because I like things set up in a particular way, and I tend to save a lot of things both on the desktop and in the Documents folder.  Both of those live on the C: drive, but because I bought an SSD (Solid State Drive) for the main disk, I was worrried I’d fill it up pretty quickly.

To that end, I moved my Documents and Desktop locations to one of the three 1TB drives I have inside.  Only the core OS will stay on the SSD to keep it as tidy as possible.  After that I installed a few games and my essential programs and began to tinker with everything else.

A great choice I made when I bought the PC was to pick up a Vantec SATA/IDE to USB adapter.  This little gizmo plugs into a hard disk and allows you to plug it into a USB port.  I used it to copy all my old hard disk files to the new 1TB disks so I’d have some access to my old files.  It’s only USB2.0 so the transfer takes a while, but it’s so handy to be able to do that without having to install them inside the case.

Vantec USB Adapter

I’m also really impressed with the case.  The amount of airflow is ridiculous.  It’s got all the cable tied up against the back wall and if you look in the front vent you can see right through the computer out the back vents.  It stays so cool too. I’m really happy with it.  The one annoying thing is the amount of lights.  They don’t need all those damned lights.

Epson is my printer manufacturer of choice, and I bought an x710W photo printer.  It was pretty cheap considering all the different stuff it can do. It’s also getting really hard to find a printer than prints on CD/DVD. I’m really happy with it.

Having the printer set up allowed me to finally frame up the maps I’ve talked about in earlier entries.  The frames only cost me $19 each but they’re really big and decent quality.  I picked up some coloured and black card from the newsagent for a backing and printed out labels to describe each map.  I still need to work out what I’m going to do with the huge Middle Earth map but I’m happy with the results of the other two.

Finally there’s the pepakura or papercraft models.  I’ve only done a K-9 model from Dr Who and it turned out ok. I’m not 100% happy with it though so I’m not posting it here.  I’m not really happy with my folding ability yet.  That sounds kind of stupid, but getting crisp lines and neat edges so you can’t tell it’s paper is really hard.  More practice I suppose.  Cutting out the shapes is tedious so I tend to work slowly.  Impatience is usually how I mess things up so I must force myself to go slowly.

See you next time.

Raiders Temple Map

Thror's Map