Papercraft Diorama
(Michelangelo vs. Foot Soldier & Mouser)
For my sixth Nintendo Gameboy papercraft diorama, I picked an underground setting from the first stage of Konami's 1990 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Fall of the Foot Clan video game. The sewers are the TMNT's home, so, that's certainly an appropriate environment to bring to 3-Dimensional life in this case.
This is the reference screenshot I worked from. The sprite layer has been disabled, for clarity/editing purposes, which is why you don't see a Turtle or any of his mechanical foes. I wanted to get an image that had a lot of pipes and masonry in it, and this certainly fits the bill.
Here's the sheet I put together of ripped and edited game graphics (feel free to save and print it out if you want to try making a similar diorama). I really should stop putting a bunch of sprites on there that I'm never going to use (i.e., I only made one figure of Mikey, so all the rest of them are just a waste of space that I could have used for his three brothers or something else instead).
Pictured is the unglued pattern/layout for the masonry and sewer water. The geometry for this piece was relatively complex, compared to the previous five Gameboy papercraft dioramas I've done. It didn't show up that great in the photo, but I colored the different facets with colored pencil to help me keep everything straight. You really have to pay attention to what you're doing when you're drawing up and measuring the blueprints for stuff like this--it's incredibly easy to screw things up if you don't think things through carefully. Everything worked out fine this time, but I've completely botched stuff like this on numerous occasions in the past.
And here it is all connected and glued together.
This is the magical part, at least for me; the dramatic change that occurs after applying the game graphics to the polygonal form always thrills me a little. Unfortunately, I didn't quite get all the bricks lined up correctly.
Test shot on the background. Time to play plumber and install some pipes next!
The finished product:
Materials:
Cardboard, game graphics printed out on white paper, white glue, newsprint, lined white notebook paper, permanent marker, acrylic paint, and transparent plastic (figure stands only).
Dimensions:
8.5 cm (3.3") x 7.6 cm (3.0") [widest point x highest point]
Time:
Three days: June 26-28, 2014.
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The repeating background graphic is black and white artwork from the TMNT: Fall of the Foot Clan instruction manual.
The midi music playing is the "opening" theme from the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon.