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Monday, February 28, 2011

Size-Matters

There was a short-lived fantasy that I would be ready with the first volume of ISNESS fot the MoCCA festival (April 9)...
NO CAN DO. Drove myself nuts (and those around me) for about a month until I faced reality.
Maybe June. But ISNESS will be all the better for it.

Meanwhile, to keep you all in the loop, I'll be posting images from the process and preparing some teasers to give out at the festival.

In the studio, miniature building is the new big game and it has taken over every nook and cranny I have real-estate rights for.
Miniature set building, as I soon found out, is no walk-in-the-park. There is a mind boggling number of scales to choose from and they all don't talk to each other...

The house rooms are being built in 1/12" scale a very common doll house scale (Every inch in doll house world equals a foot in real life).
The other scale I finally settled on for the beach-side diorama is called "HO" and is a classic model-train building scale (Evey 0.14" represents a foot)

...If you choose HO, you'll find plenty of trains stuff and diorama stuff but very little furniture or anything of modern design.
...The military scales such as 1:35 have very little beyond WWI and WWII. (Vietnam era is oddly absent) and no living quarters or furniture...
...The very common 1:12" doll house scale is designed mostly in Victorian style and has no military stuff...
...Most of the vintage doll-house furniture designed in the 50's and 60's in the style of the era, are of odd scales and hard to find.

It's truly the wild west out there when it comes to scales. The scale schism, I call it. Obviously, nobody out there has planned for ISNESS and it's mix of Vietnam era military equipment and mid century furniture.

So after months of savvy e-bay hunting It looks like I will be building, at least the kitchen from scrap. Crazy detail work. But If I followed the rules of sanity, this project would have never lifted off, anyway...

The beach diorama is coming along slowly. Here is a snippet of the further-inland area, the forest where Hunter roams. Lots of painted plaster of Paris, trees and turf from trainz.com.

Lars' room is a lot of fun to work on. He's a child who's raising himself as a thinker, in a very unsophisticated home and his choices of objects is most fascinating to me. Can't wait t fill his shelves.

The decaying concrete walls for Natashia's room. Most will be covered with wallpaper but I got carried away with the organic, messy process. Foam-core covered in paint, plaster of Paris then splashed with inky water.
When it dried I cracked and repainted it to accentuate the cracks.

Bought 30 brand new doll house windows (price undisclosed...) only to deface and mutilate them later.
They don't make post-apocalyptic windows in 1/12" scale.

A wonderful miniature garment designer, Thelma Lewis DeMet jumped on board and contributed some of her wonderful hand made pieces to the shoot.
Most of them will end up in the master bedroom which does not appear untill volume 3 of ISNESS.

Photoshop can do ANYTHING I want. Here's a test combining Lil' and her imaginary live-dolls interacting. Threw in a lens flare and some blur and converted to B&W and voila! (I don't mean to say that it's fast! Just keying out the bodies can take up to an hour for each image. At least 1,000 images will go into each volume. Sanity? Say what?)

So many options for the cover. And the fonts! So many cool fonts to choose from! I'm so glad there will be 4 volumes! This means I can design 4 covers!

A typical state of my pages: Partially edited, partially keyed out, partially desaturated...

I WILL be at MoCCA Festival with promotional material, teasers, posters and samples from the 1st volume, so DO stop by and give me a word of encouragement!