Everything I loved about this toy when I was a kid is summed up in its name: “Fright Factory.”
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Category: papercraft
I bet this one slipped by the leftist media cultural elitists:
Man Bites and Chews Off Part of Another Man’s Arm!
Much of the commentary that’s appeared on the blogosphere surrounding this event assumes that the attacker was a zombie. OK, fine, fair enough. I see the resemblance at least to the early Romero-style zombies. Some nit-picking kill-joys were hung up on the fact that the attacker didn’t go for the guy’s brains.
But let’s back up for a moment. It’s it terrifying enough to think that this guy came up out of nowhere and bit a chunk out of someone’s arm? Isn’t it even a bit creepier in fact that the guy WASN’T a zombie?
I thought my eyes were wrung out and weary of smooth, digital illustration but perhaps I was only irritated that so much of it fixates on happy-puppy subject matter. Check out these pieces by Etsy.com artist Goobeetsa. The Medusa is my favorite of the “Spooky” portraits but my heart truly belongs to the Dracula paper puppets. Hours of fun on a rainy afternoon, I tell ya. And reasonably priced.
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Skull-A-Day
Everyday for a whole year, a different skull appears on this wonderfully creative blog. Some are pieces of jewelry, some are actual skulls, some are pieces of origami, one was a computer typeface, another was a desktop pattern… you get the idea. All over the map in their media and let’s be frank, the quality of their execution but every post is a skull of some sort or another. It’s all free; it’s all fun. It’s likely the kind of thing that would appeal to someone who likes to read about nightmares and fear. The site has spawned a legion of similar projects but Skull-a-Day, as far as I can tell, was nearly the first.
Given my love of weird papercraft, one of my favorite entries is this one for a papercraft skull complete with an articulated jaw.
There are cool limited edition t-shirt to support the site, ones with the logo “Nevermore” and a bird (my guess is that it’s a raven) and, you guessed it, a skull.
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Munster’s Car Papercraft
As a kid, I preferred the Addams Family to The Munsters but you’ve got to admit that the the cars that the Munsters drove were pretty cool. Here is a papercraft version of the Barris designed Munster Koach. The guy who turned this car into a paper model has a link for donations so send him a buck or two. The model is quite fantastic.
Yesterday I mentioned the cool papercraft coffins at Ravensblight.com — I’ve got one on my desk as I type this. And right next to it is another papercraft model that is, if this is possible, even cooler. It’s a “Shambler” from the video game Quake. Remember that? It was the first papercraft model I ever assembled and it was relatively simple to make. Just print the .pdfs on heavy paper, ideally from a color printer, cut them out with an x-acto blade, fold and glue ’em up with normal white glue. I became quite addicted to papercraft for a little while last summer since it’s so cheap and the models can be pretty darned fantastic.
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Other Haunts — Ravensblight.com
Ravensblight.com is a fun, well-conceived and executed concept website that takes as its central metaphor a haunted town. The MOST fun part for me at least was the “Toystore” which features a couple DOZEN creepy papercraft models to print out and build.
Papercraft for those not familiar with it is a craft somewhat similar to origami in that you start with a flat sheet of paper and you end up with a three-dimensional object. But since the “rules” of papercraft allow scissors and elaborately printed paper, the object are — to be blunt– WAY cooler than origami. The technique behind papercraft is a pretty cool mixture of high-tech and low-tech. High tech computer-aided-design tools are used to create 3-d models of things… in Ravensblight’s case, for instance, mechanical bats or the tiny coffins shown above. Then another program “unfolds” the object into a 2-d surface and saves it as a .pdf. From a crafter’s perspective, it’s all low-tech simple: all you have to do is download the .pdf’s, print them with a color printer ideally on stiff paper and assemble. It’s a great rainy day activity and heck it’s a blast to have a little line of coffins on your desk!