ThePatch :: Toy on Parade & Transportation

It is the last outing for my virtual creation the Blue Lego Guy on the Patch, and it was about transportation. I was down at Point Lonsdale and a lot of the things to move around looked like fun, but they where possibly more sport than pure transportation. Anyway why deny the Blue Lego Guy some fun.

I had photographed cars, boats & even container ships, but the guy didn’t look happy. Then I realised he needed to be with lego, real lego. So my young grandson helped out again. This time building a technical lego monster truck. The Blue Lego Guy was in his element helping out.

ThePatch :: Toy on Parade & Games

I figure I should at least have some fun with this weeks theme at ThePatch , Toy on Parade & Games. It has to be the same toy,(ie the Blue Lego Guy) . So what games would he like to play, or more particularly be part of? Why not chess, I could design the pieces in Lego!  Which I did. (Ok that took a fair while but I have designed a proper lego chess set, and the complete build instructions are available on request).

Some preliminary tests shot for composition escaped (more precisely they were vacuumed up by google auto-backup, which I had only turned on to see if I could get a couple of *HDR autoawesome images from my photowalk on Tuesday). These test shots were made into a short *Motion animated gif. Not exactly exciting but you can see me experimenting with f-stop to try and get a better depth of field. The next issue was to perspective. To get a decent close up I needed a wide angle lens (ie zoom in) but I only had a near orthographic projection (common in CAD systems) available in LDD (Lego Digital Designer) To get such flat perspective I’d need to use my telephoto lens and take the photo from many meters away (and my room is not that wide). So a compromise was needed. First I experimented with tilt shift filters (with ordinary results), Then with 3D adjustment/perspective in Corel Photo Paint (much better but fiddly to set). This is getting complex.

Finally my planning turned to where to place the other chess pieces around the Blue Lego Guy and I had the grandiose idea of using a famous chess game (such as game 5 between Kasparov and the computer Deep Blue, which ended in a draw). From a low down view these games look over crowded and confusing and no one, even a chess expert could possibly recognize the game. Time to simplify the image and layout for simplicity and good composition.

Assembling the final image I ended up creating 3 layers (the the photo of me and  the chess board, the piece I am holding, and the chess pieces themselves) and adjusted them to fit in Corel Photo Paint. However as before I keep the layers separate and reassembled the image again in OnOne's Perfect Photo layers and some tweaks in Perfect Effects to get a overall photographic look. Perhaps more work than play but fun all the same.

PS for those that like Where's Wally style puzzles, there is one actual Lego piece in this picture, can you find it?

The Patch :: Toy on Parade at Work

My first plan for this week’s thepatch theme, Toy on Parade At Work was to have the Blue Lego Guy working as a Lego designer (see above), a nice bit of self reference there. Nice clean desk by the way guy. Which was fun to set up and shoot but he was creating an artist and artists work too, right! So the idea snowballed to becoming a en plein air outdoor painting set, nice again but the artist idea had taken hold and I needed something a bit more creative.

A selfportrait … perfect, now we are really talking self reference. It ended up as three separate layers and three separate images. The background was a real easel, the self portrait was a front on image of the lego guy (the one used in the photo above) but re-rendered with corel painter light, using oil bristle brushes and marker pens (a very loose self-portrait it is, but have you seen the size of his brush! The Blue Lego Guy was a separate layer again direct from LDD (that’s Lego Digital Designer). The layers where assembled in Corel Photo Paint but retouched in OnOne's Perfect Effects to get a more photographic finish.

ThePatch :: Toy on Parade in Nature

The patch theme this month is Toy On Parade, and the same toy needs to be in each photo. After having fun with my grandson making the automobile awesome motion gif earlier in the year I figure this was a challenge made for a bit more lego fun. If you have seen the lego movie on DVD and watched the special features you will have seen one of the designers describing some of the designs He is using a program called Lego Digital Designer, which can be downloaded from Lego. The models for the lego movie where largely developed with this easy to use CAD like program. It can be a little daunting (if your older than 6), it has a database of every lego part there is!  I quickly realized it does give me the ability to create a character that could be easily pose & animated. Perfect for this challenge, assuming a virtual character can be on parade. My young lego advisor loved the project and wisely helped choose a very simple character with which to build some adventures and hopefully some good photos. Meet Blue Lego Guy.

His first adventure in Nature, clearly was to be based around a small blue wren I had seen and photographed at a Jells Park lake on Friday. With some head scratching, even reading the manual and using the layers in Paint.NET I was soon able to acquaint blue lego guy with the blue wren.  Ok not so convincing and I liked a different photography anyway, with some raindrops on the grass around the wren but with depth of field giving a more blended background onto which to superimpose blue lego guy. A little bit of posing adjustements back in Lego Digital Designers and adding a camera, yellow of course. Getting convincing perspective was a bit of a challenge and I had to wing that in the end as well as guessing the relative height he might be.  A little bit of cloning to put a couple of blades of grass in front of his legs and some suggestions of shadows. Finally a cinematic wide screen crop.
Voilá ….Smile Mr Wren!

Wasn’t so hard after all. Stay turned for more Blue Lego Guy adventures.

The Broken Teapot Mystery

"I was set up!"