Earthworm Jim diorama

Mrs Blinky and I have been watching quite a lot of Bob Ross in recent weeks (BBC4 every weekday Mon-Thurs, 7.30pm if you’re asking). And one thing he emphasises is the need to create “an impression of” something.

He doesn’t paint every leaf on every tree – rather he splodges the brush around and they look enough like leaves to be accepted as leaves on a tree.

With this in mind, I decided that instead of trying to recreate an exact replica of the Earthworm Jim game in my diorama, and aim more for an “impression” of it.

Suddenly everything became easier!

Just a few minutes on Thingiverse and I had a selection of rocks ready for 3d printing. I sliced the tops and bottoms using Blender, and hollowed them out and added drain holes for resin printing.

Then, using screen grabs and Inkscape, I created “ledge tops” for them and laser cut yet more mdf

I found a mini retro fridge on Thingiverse (https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1886922) and rescaled it to better fit the 32mm scale I was working with.

Although there are plenty of anatomically correct cows and bullocks on Thingiverse – and the cows that appear in the Earthworm Jim game are more “realistically proportioned” – once I discovered this cartoon cow, I figured it fitted in far better, with the zany cartoon-like qualities that the diorama was starting to take on.

(https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4058762)

Having decided that a “representation” of the game would be good enough, it also allowed me enough creative licence to use this “scrapper wrecker crane and ball” in place of the more traditional “construction crane” that appears in the game

(https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3027321)

All that remained was to find which of the many, many Patreon files I bought over the last few months that contains the pile of tyres I recalled seeing, and print everything out on the old AnyCubic Photon resin printer….