I just finished watching Star Wars Rebels and on a whim, looked up some related some domain names and to my surprise – karabast.com was available! So naturally, I bought it! I tossed a simple page up for now. No definitive plans for it at this point.
I launched a new site over the weekend – Customizer Corner. It’s a search engine for custom action figure and diorama parts. I needed something like this for myself and figured others could use it too. I launched it by posting it in ~6 of the action figure groups I’m a member of on Facebook. The response was overwhelmingly positive which is amazing.
My original plan was to write the “data gathering code” and put it in a WordPress site as a POC. Once I saw it worked, I was going to write a backend from scratch. But… the more I used WordPress the more I saw it can get me to about 90% of what I wanted. It has faceted searching and the ability to search in tags. So I changed my mind and figured I’d just use WordPress. Now I’m finding some shortcomings and I’m rethinking that… I’m still not 100% happy with the searching… searching for two words doesn’t work like I want and some of the ideas I have for the site just don’t fit well into WordPress, so I’m looking to see if there is a site framework I can easily use. If not, I guess I’ll write it from scratch.
I talked with Neil at Red Flare Models and he is an enthusiastic backer of the site and idea. I also talked to Brian at https://customsforthekid.blogspot.com/ and he is totally on board too. Cool stuff.
BTW – If you prefer this type of tutorial as a short youtube video, let me know.
So I’ve been playing around some more with making (cowboy) hats and came up with something that seems to work pretty well for me. This technique could be used for making other types of hats and I have even used this basic concept to make leather-ish clothing. The good thing is, this technique is cheap to experiment with.
This was a fun one to make. Here is my 8-T Gardening Droid from Into The Dark (High Republic). They are described as “similar appearance to that of an astromech droid dome, with magnetic treads and pincer claws that the droids used for pruning plants.” I actually suspect the bottom tread portion should be smaller but I had this so went with it.
Since I started reading the new High Republic books I’ve been wanting to create a figure and finslly finished one (more on the way). I took inspiration from the concept art but went my own direction with it.
Full Nihil custom action figure gallery but here’s the finished figure:
This guy is essentially 6 inch Star Wars Black Series scale. Recipe:
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