The Wildhearts

This was my first attempt at recreating actual real people in miniature. I’d made a street-scene for my cyberpunk Titan Forge competition a few months back (https://www.beastsofwar.com/project/1497669/) and quite enjoyed using reference photos to make a slightly-more-realistic looking diorama so set about looking up footage of The Wildhearts playing live.

Both CJ and Ginger play sticker-splattered Gibson “Lucille” ES335 guitars live. Ginger ofter changes his guitars around (pictured here, the f-hole version of his guitar) and has even been known to play a Flying-V.

But it’s almost impossible to find a photo of CJ playing live with the Wildhearts playing anything other than a Gibson ES335. It was time to put my Blender skills to the test…

In all honesty, I spent far too long on this modification as I would have liked. The first Gibson guitar model I found on Thingiverse and hacked into my .stl didn’t really work. I spent hours removing the Stratocaster from the original model (using multiple boolean operations to remove it piece-by-piece) then boolean merged the Gibson guitar in place.

But when I put the modified .stil into the slicer, the guitar model was hollow and only a couple of pixels wide even at the thickest part!

So I downloaded a different guitar model and used that instead. The same thing happened.

I kept making minor changes to the original .stl and merging in the replacement guitar, exporting as .stl and running it through my Chitubox slicer to see that the model was consistently solid.

This took aaaagges. But, eventually, I had a 3d-printable .stl of a bald-headed guy appearing to play a Gibson ES335 in place of the Stratocaster he originally held.

All that remained was to find a “pork pie hat” on Thingiverse, rescale it and plop it on his head. I added a simple cylinder shape between to the two not only to fill any gaps, but also to represent a headband/headscarf.

Having spent far too long on this one particular character, I figured “screw it, Ginger can just play a Flying-V in this vignette”.

I grabbed a couple of models of the classic 12×4 Marshall cabinet and guitar amplifier “head” and threw each model into Prusa slicer to add supports ready for printing….