TIE Advanced

Wanted something to clear mind so I dug into my (annoyingly small) stash of models and pulled out this TIE Advanced (aka Vaders fighter from A New Hope).   

It only took an hour or so to build, but it went together smoothly.   Didn't bother painting as Empirical ships are notoriously kept clean (aka no weathering required).

Anyhoo.  Here it is.

 

Between Christmas and New Years - the lazy times.

 The days between Christmas and New Years are the laziest days of the year, aren't they?

This is the inspiration for my latest work (actually I made this before the break and subsequent laziness set in, but I am backfilling my inspiration - back-spiration? - for this one).

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Holding Stuff Extravaganza

I have finished my Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Holding Stuff series.

This all started a couple months ago when I was looking for more storage opportunities, and I pulled out an old bin from a shelf in my studio, and found the collection of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles figures I bought a bunch of years ago - I forget when I got them, but it was well before the pandemic, so its been a minute.

I have not shot these figures very much.  For a while there my action figure acquisition rate vastly exceeded my ability to photograph them artistically, so I have a bunch of figures that have not graced my camera. This set of 4 7" turtles from NECA being one of them.  When I saw the figures sitting in that forgotten box, I got a mental image of a shot that was selectively lit, with Raphael holding up his weapon of choice, a Sai, with a very shallow depth of field, so Raph would fade into the background.

It was time to play! A couple hours later I had this shot.

I really liked the photo, and it turned out exactly how I envisioned it would in my minds eye.   Since there are 4 turtles, and I had the whole set, I decided to let all of them grace my lens, and my artistic eye. All shot with the same style.

I like some more than others, but over the next couple of months I managed to capture a photo of each turtle.  These are the images I came up with:

That completed the set of turtles. Sometime around the 3rd and 4th turtle I was cleaning another part of my studio and I realized I had actually purchased the turtles sensei, Splinter, in a post-COVID trip to a second hand toy store, so I shot his portrait as well.

Splinter was a nice way to finish off this series.  

Most of my work is singletons - I rarely think in terms of series, so it was kinda of nice to revisit the same processing style over and over.  It was nice having that restriction.

I figure I'd end this post with a few behind-the-scenes shots of what these figures look like when I take their photos.   

Thus ends the post about these heroes on the half-shell. Turtle power!

One Million Views

 Somewhere along the line in the last few days my little ol' blog crested the one million views mark.  I suspect most of those are bots - after all its called "Only Googlebot Reads This Blog", so thanks bots!

A Room For The Kid(pool)

 I put the finishing touches on a room for the Kid(pool).

Tiny Arm Energy Pt. 4

 The T-Rex escape sequence in Jurassic Park is one of my favourite cinematic moments. So I decided to recreate it.

I started by 3D printing and painting the T-Rex, and creating the diorama out of foam and 3D printed fence posts. The man is an Indiana Jones figure. The rest is the magic of camera lenses, lights, photoshop,textures, grunge, all that good stuff.

I made a video showing the whole process here:

Tiny Arm Energy Pt. 3

 Put the finishing touches on the large diorama for the T-Rex.  This is now camera ready!