Recent UFO Sightings in the Workshop

It's been a while since I've posted anything substantial, so here's a quick rundown of UnFinished Objects (UFOs) hanging around in the shop lately...

First up, I've cranked out a couple new Warhammer 40,000 Space Marines.  One is a Pre-Heresy version of the Dark Angel:



That one's pretty, but the better one is Captain Titus from last year's video game Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine by THQ:


While I've been working on those, my friend Matt has taken the lead on this year's Halloween project:




I'm not entirely sure how many of us there will be, but if you see a gaggle of Ghostbusters in downtown Petaluma on Halloween, it's us:


In other news, I received a particularly interesting shipment on Friday.  This is the first of three skids containing my shiny new 3D printer:


The other two packages were much bigger:


This is the printer I won in the "Make it Real" Challenge on Instructables.com back in June.  I have named it "Jarvis."  You can see some of the specs here: http://objet.com/3d-printers/desktop/objet30-pro

Any suggestions as to what I should have him make?

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MAKE Magazine

If you've never read MAKE Magazine, you should.  I make it a point to run down to the news stand and buy a copy every time a new issue comes out.  The latest issue hit shelves yesterday.  It's at least twice as awesome as the previous issues, so I bought two:



Ask for it at your local bookstore.  Failing that, Barnes & Noble carries it.

Kali Costume Part 2: It's Hard to Find a Model With Four Arms

In my last post about the Kali costume for the Hi-Rez Studios game SMITE, I detailed the making of the prosthetic chest.  The main reason for making the chest prosthetic was to be able to rig a harness to hold up the extra pair of arms she needed attached to her back.

Here's how I made the extra arms:


If that doesn't make it crystal clear, read on...

Building Agent Maine (aka "the Meta") from Red vs. Blue Part 1: the Helmet

Some time ago I traded another maker one of my HALO 3 Mark6 Spartan helmets and got a copy of his hand-sculpted EVA helmet.  It was well made and the casting was nice and strong, but it was also a little on the small side.  I finished it up in the colors of Agent Maine from the popular webseries RED vs BLUE and wrote a quick article about making the visor which you can read by clicking HERE.

Since finishing it, I've had it hanging in the rafters of my workshop.  I have a lot of helmets hanging in the rafters.  Most of them just need some tiny finishing touch.  Some of them are just waiting for me to start trimming and paint work.  Others, like this one, are mostly just being forgotten.

While it was being forgotten it also suffered a fall when I was moving some lumber around and knocked it off its hook.  I was able to reassemble it, but in the process I was reminded that I'd rather have another version of this particular helmet that was just a bit bigger and had sharper edges.

If you'd like to see the steps involved in making the upgrade helmet from start to finish, read on...

Looks Like the Clock is Still Ticking on My Fifteen Minutes of Fame...

For those of you who didn't see Nightline last night:


I thought I had a backlog of orders to fill before.  I think it's about to get worse...

When it Rains it Pours

Right now it's raining Combat Garden Gnomes.

I've just come back from my annual training with the naval reserves and it turns out I've got a huge backlog of orders for combat garden gnomes waiting to ship. 

I've even enlisted help:


If you're one of the hundred or so customers currently waiting on orders to ship, please be patient while I work through them. 

I’ve been restocking the Etsy shop as fast as I can, but I don’t have any on hand right now while I’m trying to catch up on shipping my outstanding orders.  If you’d like to pre-order one of my gnomes, shoot me an email at sthorsson99@yahoo.com. 

You can see all of the different variants I make in this flickr photo set: http://www.flickr.com/photos/8050182@N06/sets/72157623870627643/

In other news, I've just received the first set of photos of one of my Combat Garden Gnomes in an actual combat zone: 
 

That photo was taken at Camp Leatherneck in Afghanistan.  Here's a close-up showing this particular little gnome augmentee in all his forward deployed glory:


Awesome.


.