Dissertation: The impact of video games on children

Nah, it’s not really a dissertation on video games and its influences on kids. Well, by extension I guess it touches on the subject, because I was once a kid who played video games, but let’s not focus on that…

Back in ’11 I got myself a ‘Nightmare Edition Dreamer’, a limited edition version of The Dreamer and Lord Chompy Bits for Malifaux. First of all, it’s one big chunk of metal whoms weight is only matched by its horrible gaps between the pieces – So it required a lot of pinning and greenstuffing. Greenstuff-intense wise I think this project is my biggest so far, tied somewhere with my Pyramid head.

One of the biggest reasons I havn’t touched this model before is the simple fact that I didn’t have any idea of what to do with it – I wanted it to be grand and awesome, since it was a grand and awesome model, of course, but besides that I was pretty much at loss.  For those that follow my blog they know that I prefer to add little tints of “popular culture” in my projects to spice them up a bit ( beforementioned Pyramid head, Skeletor, Beastman, Baron Samedi/Wilbur Whateley, The Illuminatus, Discordians/Hagbard Celine, Alucard and so on…). Obviously, I couldn’t just paint this model up in a monstrey evil way and call it a day. I’ve seen a lot of sweet Dreamer models with cool themes as well, like Spiderman and stuff, but sadly I don’t have any URLs for them.  So without any real inspiration, the project fell into slumber (hurr hurr dreamer hurr hurr) for a bit.. until it was picked up by the most unlikely creature imaginable. A hobbit, Bilbo Baggins, of the Shire. No, wait, that’s another story. It was picked up because the Malifools held a competition to try and make a Malifaux crew out of old children’s book. Now, Super Mario’s not really a book, but this whole competition got the gears grinding. Initially, I was thinking of making a Marcus crew with Marcus as Mario, Myranda as Peach etc, but it ended up feeling..forced, and not really very good. After a few days, I remembered I had that old shrinkwrapped box with Dreamer and everything clicked. So, In the role of Mario – The Dreamer and in the role of Yoshi – Lord Chompy Bits:

Super Mario in itself is pretty cute and harmless, but as with most cute and harmless stuff, if you give it a lil’ twist, it can end up really scary instead -this is the aim of the crew, so with both the models and their bases I’m going to attempt to mimic some kind of distorted Mario world.  We’ll see how it turns out. Anyhow, back to the model at hand.

Modelling-wise, it all began in a tiny hotel room in Gothenburg earlier this fall when I was attending a job-related course in computery and processy stuff. I knew that I wouldn’t have to study overly zealously so I packed my hobby stuff so that I could spend the evenings somehow.

If the hotel clerks only knew what I was bringing in my bag.

Sadly, I didn’t take nearly enough WIP-photos, but I’ll post the few I have.

 

A baseless Dreamer

I made the hat and his cape out of Green stuff, and other than that, he’s just as vanilla as it gets. I gave his hat a ‘D’ for Dreamer instead of a Mario-M. It just felt better that way.

From the wonders of Ebay, a ?-box to use as a mold!

Lord Chompy’s WIP-base

I wanted the base to really take in as much “Nintendoesque” elements as possible, without getting cluttered, so made a ?-box and a pipe, which were among the most iconic things I  could think of.

Dark, brooding and nostalgic. Just like the author of this post?

Dreaming of me

Both Dreamer and LCB has the ?-box as a common denominator to tie them together. Idea is that Dreamer finds a Yoshi egg in it, which leads to the transformation of him hopping up on LCB in the game. Gave it some shrubbery and rush and stuff to try and further the attempt of relaying “twisted mario world” and made it half-stuck in the mud.

By the powers of magnetism and a tiny drill!

It always felt like a must-have to magnetize Dreamer so that he could be popped on and off of LCB. Was hell to try and cover the magnet up on LCB.

A great picture for someone shy, right?

Yeah, not the best of picture, but I wanted to add a Shy Guy crawling out of the pipe and figured I could just as well mention it here. Shy Guys will feature as Alps in my crew and will mostly be coming out of pipes, so yeah.

A lil’ sad mushroom

 

Is that a big nasty tongue or are you just happy to see me?

That’s it, for now!