Saturday, October 24, 2009

Miscellaneous Artifacts, October 2009

This month's planned projects are on hold due to development and procurement issues. Meanwhile, I took care of some local gift requests. Sometimes, it helps to do something different in order to get some insights on your current and future projects.


This week's artifacts includes a rose. I opted to try to take advantage of the colors of the card itself than paint. Luckily, Magic cards have art that usually fits the color of the card frame. In this case, we have a lot of Rock Jockeys and Enslaved Dwarves. I was contemplating making the sepals green on both sides, but it still worked out fine. The rose was fun to build, and a good simple hour's worth of work. Loc-tite made gluing and assembling the petals faster, as the curvature worked against me during construction.

The other artifact of interest is a rough model of a Spanish galleon. My third ever boat. My first was made out of school handbooks and masking tape. My second was a blocky destroyer made from 110 lb cardstock and lots of geometry. I've learned a bit from those attempts, but still need some more knowledge on shipbuilding. I opted to use the natural brown of the card backings to color the hull, but coloring other sections proved to be not as fun. I ended up making as much of the card as brown as possible rather than have a prismatic ship.


I didn't add any rigging, since I'd have to plan out all the mounting locations and glue lots of thread down. The deck's quite bare, since most of the time was spent on hull construction. I added some cannons to make the hull less bland.


For the ship, I gave in and started to use land cards. There were a lot of played land cards that just had to go. I also wanted to get some white color for the sails and plains were the best alternative. I figure land art is better to look at than a zombie gnawing on a guy. There's a couple Italian Mirage forests here and there.

Sunday, October 11, 2009

Would You Like A Second Opinion? You Are Also Ugly!

Sometimes, you get unexpected things that make you laugh. Sometimes, you get this while eating gummy bears:

Figure 1: Regular healthy gummy bear on the left, and what appears to be a cancerous blob on the right.

I brought the specimen to the resident doctor and game warden. Hopefully, they can shed some light on the mysterious specimen. By the time I transported the specimen, I had found that there were some other abnormal bears being analyzed at the sample room.

The red bear on the left was likely formed prematurely. The one on the right lost a limb and had lots of red discoloration on the region. None of them seemed to interact with the green blob.

Medic: I haf never seen anyzing like zat in my life.
Sniper: I wonder if it's hostile to humans. Mind if I take a closer look?


Sniper: It's quite squishy, mate. I can't tell which side is the head. Or what it's supposed to be. Is Norad sure that this originally was supposed to be a gummy bear?

The specimen was agitated and grew hostile. Defensive action was needed.

I think I'm looking at its bum...

You can tell by the subtle shifting of mass towards the Sniper that the blob was acting aggressive. There was no other means of subduing the organism peacefully. The Sniper took aim and put it down. After that, it was dissected and sacrificed for a few bits of health.

I'll be back to normal posts once I procure the proper materials needed for this week's project.