Mini Ennis House Tiles - Blade Runner, Rocketeer etc

Bloop

Sr Member
So I've been working on a miniature bust of Deckard from Blade Runner (seen here: Should I just change this sculpt to a different character? (updated 11-24-12)). I finally figured out what I wanted to do for a base, which involves using the Ennis House tiles, seen in Deckard's apartment:
Blade Runner Ennis House.jpg


The tiles are from Frank Lloyd Wright's Ennis House, which pop up in other movies and tv shows, like The Rocketeer, Farscape, and Buffy The Vampire Slayer, to name a few.

So, I wanted to make some on a small scale. I decided on 1.25" x1.25". To make them, I started with an image of a 3D Sketchup version found here:
ENNIS HOUSE STYLE TILE 3D by ZALVEZ - Google 3D Warehouse
ennis_tile.jpeg


I adjusted the image a bit, reversing it, as it would be a mold:
ennis_tile.png
attachment.php


I printed the image out multiple times on 110lb card stock. Then I cut out each layer as needed and super glued them onto the flat image, building up the layers to get my mold:
ennis_tile_form_quater.png

attachment.php


To help me build up the layers properly, I came up with this image to help keep track of the depth:

ennis_tile_reverse_levels.png
attachment.php


I went in "rainbow" order of depth: red is the deepest, then orange, yellow, green, cyan, blue, purple, then finally white as the shallowest. In case it's confusing, I added one layer of card stock for every color level. So red was the bottom layer, orange is 2 layers of card stock, yellow is 3 layers and so on.

Finally, I rolled out Super Sculpey clay, pressed it into my mold, and got my tile! After making a bunch, I boiled them in water to harden them up.

ennis_tile_1st_pull.png
attachment.php


They're far from perfect, and some warping occurred, maybe the clay needs to be thicker. I didn't do any cleanup on them yet either. They're kind of rough, but I think they'll work for my needs, especially at this small size.

Anyway, just thought I'd share a cheap, relatively easy way of making these. The good thing about this is it's easy to scale up, as long as you increase your thickness of layers accordingly. I was thinking of trying this full scale with regular cardboard.
 
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Your description sounds very interesting. Unfortunately your photos are not displaying.
Same here...no pics showing:confused:
Does no one look at when stuff was posted? The OP was 8 years ago. That could explain it (if pics were even there to begin with).
Yes, for whatever reason, pics from that long ago didn't work anymore (the site has gone through some redesigns since then). I was going to just leave it at that, but luckily, I still had the pics on an old hard drive, and it only took me a minute to find them. So I figured I might as well fix the broken images since there was a small amount of interest in this thread, and it didn't take much time to redo it.

Thank for the interest, I'm not sure if any of this is that helpful nowadays, what with the proliferation of 3D printing, but I suppose there's always something to be said for an analog solution too!
 
Found these pics in a different folder, they were probably part of the original post. This is how the tiles turned out after boiling them in water.
IMG_20120427_181420.jpg

ennis_tiles.png
 
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