accomplished

This Display, based on my previous mini Dino gardens, materialised over the past weekend. We’re all big fans of Dr Who in my household. My daughter knew of Daleks and Tardi (i assume that’s the plural) from a very early age.

Back to the project, as before, the base is an 80mm saucer that cost 25p from a DIY shop, the landscape is polymer clay,  work in progress shots available here and here. Finally it was painted in acrylics and finished with model railway scatter material.

To hide the gap between the base of the Tardis and the ground  I glued a layer of grass around its base, allowing it to be positioned anywhere on the display

Like this? Check out the other dino gardens and our Dalek garlic bread

Mk 2 of the dino garden.  Clay dish (25p @ B& Q) approx 75mm diameter. Polymer clay, scatter material and acrylic paints.

Dinosaur from the Early Learning Centre as before.

The base is from a mini Zen garden set, the sort they sell in bookshops.

The base is fimo (soft), prodded with a 3.5mm stereo jack and painted in acrylics. The bushes are standard model railway stuff.

This started out as 3 separate projects (use the base, dinosaurs and alien terrain) but pretty quickly merged into one. the Dino zen garden now sits on my desk.

More pics after the jump

Continue reading

As it’s Valentines day next week, it seems like a good time to post this project from 2008.

Partly inspired by Meredith Scheff’s travel journal this formed the casing for my ‘and finally’ present for my fiancée for Xmas 08.  Inside the book is a hollowed section, inside that a purple felt purse, inside that, a sparkly bracelet (the actual present). Continue reading

I made this after becoming  fascinated with the dry brushing technique used by modellers. Made using fimo, cling film (to mold the base of the original dock), a rock and knife  for texturing and some old coins for a bit of weight.

My original idea was to have tiny N or HO scale people worshipping it, sort of like the 2001: A Space Odyssey Monolith. That never happened, as i was pretty happy with just the rock effect.

Ever Noticed that ‘Garlic’ and ‘Dalek’ sound the same? I have!. One is a close relation to an onion and official deodoriser of the French, the other is grotesque mutated organism integrated with a tank-like mechanical casing made of “dalekenium”. All these similarities (yes, all of them) got me thinking, maybe we could somehow fuse xenophobic killer mutants-in-a-box with dough and create…wait for it… Dalek Bread. Lets begin. Continue reading

I’d been toying with the idea of a rock tumbler for some 18 months, but was finding it difficult to justify the outlay. To cut a long story short, my mum got me one for xmas and for the last 4 days its been churning away in my shed.

So far the results are looking promising, this batch is going back in for another 4 days with 80 grit. After that it gets tumbled for a week at progressivly finer grits before at least a week of polishing.

For more about rock tumbling, an excellent guide can be found here.

Parts List

• A Photo, drawing or idea
• Lego lots of
• more Lego
• Time

Step One – convince the NLSO (Non Lego significant other)

I’d wanted to make a Lego mosaic for some time, but lacked suitable Inspiration. Nine months later and inspiration hit in the form of my new born daughter, Ffion Carys.

When Ffion was about 4 months old, I started the mosaic. It took a while to convince Lou (my fiancée) that this was a good idea and worth the money. She was up for a mosaic, but only a small one, I wanted a big one (don’t we all?). Anyway the 2 images to the right convinced her, one is a single Lego baseboard (48*48) the other is 4 baseboards (96*96).

I found a suitable picture of Ffion that my brother had taken when she was about 3 months old, a bit of tweaking was needed, just to straighten it up a bit.

I reduced the image to 90 *90 pixels (giving me a 3 pixel border) and reduced the colours to a close approximation of the Lego bricks I was planning on using ( Black, Drk Grey, Light Grey and white).

So far so good, once I had the image at the right size and colour, I used a program called Bricksaic to generate the plans. Bricksaic does a lot more than just generate the plans. It can do all the parts I did in photoshop, but I preferred to have the extra control over the image.

The Plans also gave me a piece count. About 8000. ouch!

This is the point at which I made a mistake, I generated the plans without the border on, so all my plans were shifted 6 studs up and left. I wouldn’t find this out till some time later when I had the parts and the plans printed. Continue reading

Projects to follow