Head over Heels - Dungeonalia entry

…. because the project system stopped me adding content after a couple of paragraphs. So let’s pretend this one is called “who mentioned Wallace and Grommitt?”

Picking up where we left off….

I really got into texture rolling (ok, I got really excited by printing a load of texture rollers and thinking of all the great tiles I could make with them) so printed a few different rollers.

I tried rolling a large(r) sheet of Fimo, and applying grid-lines using a steel ruler.

I wasn’t convinced with the effect. To begin with, I’m rubbish at getting everything perfectly square, so they look a little bit wonky anyway.
But it also feels quite inflexible – the smaller, individual tile approach gives me more options.

And, frankly, looks a lot better…

Which leads me onto the rather tenuous link to the Aardman classic Wallace and Grommitt.

See, there’s something quite appealing about a “hand-made, had-crafted” finish to this game. It’s a retro-cartoon-like 8-bit computer game converted to the desktop.

I would be really tempting to just whack everything into Blender, create a whole virtual world on the screen and press “print”.
But there’s something really nice about actually making something “old-school”. And the finished result looking like it too.

Just like the original Wallace and Grommitt films.
They don’t suffer from being hand-animated stop-motion movies. In fact, the odd frame with a thumbprint in the cobblestones is exactly what makes them so endearing. They look like what they are – hand-made, cartoony, retro nostalgia.

More modern animation films may look more sophisticated, and probably take a fraction of the time to create, when everything is computer generated. But this is old-fashioned, warm-your-heart pure nostalgia.
Which means actually making stuff with my hands instead of a mouse!