This Ringwraith was part of the 'Soldier and Scenes' series of figures from Play Along Toys that was released in 2003 and posted here on the blog back in January 2011. The Chat GPT prompt used here was "place the Ringwraith from the Lord of The Rings at Weathertop". I like the image but should have specified that I wanted him inside the ruins vs. outside on a hill. That's okay though - as an image it stands up well in its own right.
Ed
Sometimes I call this the crater rim, other times mountains, still at other times referring to them as hills. Whatever - you know what I mean. This is the really messy part of working with Styrofoam, cutting off a few pieces of foam and roughing out the shapes. Then gluing them down on the board. Then vacuuming. Then doing it all over again. Not having room for a wonderfully large crater, I opted for a semi-circular design which will still give me a wide latitude of photo creativity (I hope!)
Ed
After a long dry spell in which I did not notice Peter Jackson's LOTR trilogy being played on TV, it has seen a comeback and is being shown fairly regularly now. That re-ignited the interest I have in these Play Along Toys figures which came out ~2004 and which I posted immediately after the blog started in Oct 2010. The only prompt for this figure was to remove the base and place in realistic terrain.
Ed
The dimensions of the new diorama board were determined entirely by the materials already available. I already had a scrap piece of Masonite that measured 48" (121,92cm) x 38.5" (97,79cm) for the top and some odd-sized panels of 1" Styrofoam. All that was needed was something to frame the whole thing with. For that I went to the hardware store and bought a couple of lengths of that fake lumber stuff that's precut to resemble dimensional lumber. The 1"x2" material was just fine and after cutting to the desired length, was glued and nailed to the 1x2's. With the frame in place, I glued the Styrofoam panels to the top with Elmer's Wood Glue (also something I already had on hand). Sorry - there's no photos of that step.
Ed
Way back in 2012 I blogged the building of this bookshelf display to use for my space toys. It's gotten a lot of mileage over the years and I really enjoy photographing toys on it.
However, I wanted a larger diorama base that looked more like the moon than Mars. It's great having different colored diorama bases but a gray-tone Moonscape is more in keeping with a lot of my space toys. To that end I had been saving artwork of the Moon for years now, much of which was conceptual art showing what exploring and colonizing that little gray ball in space might be like.
Over the next ten(ish) installments I'll be covering the building of my new Moonscape diorama base.
Ed
