[subego]

Originally Posted by reader50 

Nail paint. It's meant to be glossy, and is available in every imaginable color. Including many shades of gold. Optional sparkles.

An excellent idea! More convenient than the spray paint because…

Originally Posted by Laminar 

Just Chicago things.

It’s illegal to sell spray paint in the city.

[Laminar]

And yet vandalism still exists! Government doesn't work!

[andi*pandi]

Even to grownups who couldn't POSSIBLY misuse it?

Back in the day in Boston, a college group needed a senior to purchase the paint for ... an art project.

More recently I was amused that the one thing the Home Depot self-checkout machines called a real person over to process was spray paint. Excuse me mr robot just a 50 yr old white lady purchasing craft supplies...

[subego]

When I was in art school you needed to be 21 to buy paint crayons.

[ghporter]

Well at least dry erase markers are “low odor” nowadays. No more sticking a blue Expo up the nose for some sort of chemical stimulation….

[subego]

King Size Sharpies are still maximum odor, and it’s glorious.

As a not smell related aside, I recommend trying Staedtler Lumocolor dry erase markers.

[ghporter]

I didn’t know Staedtler made anything dry erase. The stuff I’m familiar with is awesome. Some of the sturdiest fine-point permanent markers I’ve ever come across, great drafting equipment, and lots of other stuff. Very interesting…

[subego]

Much sturdier than Expos!

[subego]

Finally finished these. Spray mounted to heavier stock with clear vinyl on the front. The vinyl clouds it up a bit and isn’t as sticky as I want. At least the latter means I can remove it without damage if I need to call an audible when it comes to mounting.



I’m hoping the pressure of the rotini and rice in their respective jars will keep the labels stuck.

[subego]

Craft find:



Nova retractable hobby knife. I’m tired of risking stitches putting the cap back on an x-acto.


Edit: like it so much I bought 6. One for the ex. Two for the set. Three to get ready for myself so I can litter them all over my apartment.

[ghporter]

Stuff the rotini and rice in the jars firmly to put pressure on the insides of the labels. The rotini may be more of a challenge, but the rice should be pretty easy. Once the label is positioned, you may not need to keep the contents all the way up the label. Depending in how sticky the labels are, of course.

I gotta find me some of those Nova knives. They look very close to scalpels; think of that as an endorsement of how precise they should be.

[subego]

Here’s the Amazon link. Comes with either pink or blue slider buttons. As far as I can tell, it’s a knockoff standard x-acto type blade.

https://www.amazon.com/Retractable-C...ps%2C94&sr=8-2

[subego]

My next mission is a bit difficult.

For whatever reason, from a decade before I was born until whenever they adopted their current branding, this is the only image on the Internet of a box of Lorna Doones.



Incomplete, low resolution, and crummy white balance. I’m throwing some AI at the low resolution problem. It’s probably working well enough for a background element.

[andi*pandi]

What era are you looking for?

I found a lot with this search:
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ftsa&q=nab...ages&ia=images

This looks kind of 40s:


If you have disney+, and want the 1930s, a screenshot of this could help:

A box of Lorna Doone can be seen, in cartoon form, in Mickey's Surprise Party (1939) a theatrical advertisement/cartoon short produced by Walt Disney Productions for Nabisco.

[subego]

That’s our fallback if this becomes too much of a PITA.

We want 80s, so the lone photo is our only reference.

[subego]

[andi*pandi]

Very nice display. 1980s would kind of not match the vibe? Unless that's the point...

[reader50]

The Radford Spices can seems out-of-place for 1980s. And I wonder about the plastic shaker on top of a metal can lid. Was that a real product? It looks like 60s in a way. They did the drugs, designed the Pepper Can Of The Future, then did some more drugs. Everyone had a great time.

[subego]

Originally Posted by andi*pandi 

Very nice display. 1980s would kind of not match the vibe? Unless that's the point...

The official story is this set has no time period.

The unofficial story is this is based on the director’s childhood home. His parents didn’t have 80s taste, so he was surrounded by a bunch of vintage and antique decor, but they had modern (for the time) consumer products around.

So, the house has a 30s/40s feel to it, but then has 80s products, like the Honey Maids, but also has old consumer product tchotchke, like the pepper, because they would have preferred the design to a more modern pepper.

Looking it over, that pepper can is almost undoubtedly a reproduction. The bottom is clean as a whistle. I forgot whether we got it from an antique store or eBay.

[reader50]

So it was/is a real product? If you shake it and the real lid comes loose, you dump it all. Hope you like melted cheese and rye buried in pepper.

[subego]

I’m assuming it was a real product. It’s like the kind of lid they have on talcum powder, with tiny holes that are either blocked or open depending on how the lid is twisted.

[ghporter]

I grew up in a house that was built in 1940, and until it failed, we used a late-40s to early 50s refrigerator. My mom chose the color of the modern, late 1960s replacement; avocado. Honestly, it went well with the decor.

I lived there until late 1978 when I enlisted in the Air Force. There is no way appliances, furniture and household items from different eras/decades could seem incongruous to me.

[subego]

IIUC, the house itself was turn of the century, which added even more to the mish-mosh of time periods.

[subego]

Obvious option for the Lorna Doone box is trying to match typefaces.

Since I needed the AI upscaler for the photo anyway, I decided to see how well it handled the text.



This is upscaled, then auto-traced and tweaked in Illustrator. Good enough for set dressing, but it definitely imparted more character to the type than I imagine it had on the real thing.



Edit: the symbol for registered trademark required human intelligence to decipher. Checkmate, overlords.

[ghporter]

That looks great.

[subego]

TY! Here’s what I had when I called it for the night, featuring AI photo upscaling.

[andi*pandi]

looks much better.

®

[subego]

TY!

Pretty much putting a fork in this panel. Added the last two straggler elements. For the weight I did super lazy font matching.



Played with the photo a bit. Cleaned up the fringe next to the Nabisco logo. Even though I like the daisies and milk being blown out in the last one, I just know that wouldn’t happen on a real product, so I pulled some tone back into it.

[subego]

New mission. Relatively easy.



Skin is from eBay. Guts are a pack of Kools. I’ll need to fake a sticker for across the top and find new guts with white filters.

[Thorzdad]

Heh. That was the brand my mom smoked when I was growing up. Dad was always a Marlboro guy.

[ghporter]

Here’s a site for collectors of cigarette tax stamps.

It turns out that this is a pretty involved (and arcane) subject. I just remember there always being an official-looking stamp thingie on the top of a pack, and my parents would ritualistically open the top to either one side or the other of the stamp. As a non smoker, I just think of that as part of the “experience”.

Added: Not like coffee rituals aren't "part of the experience", right?

[subego]

I think nowadays, the official tax stamps are on the bottom. The sticker from the pack of Kools only had branding. No class designation or anything.

[subego]

Swiped off the Internets.

[subego]

I wish these sort of details didn’t bother me, but now I want to get the proper color paper instead of having the inkjet simulate it.

[andi*pandi]

As someone who also... gets into the details of things, some questions I might ask myself:

Does the spec require it? Will the product be zoomed in, in focus, and in frame, for enough time for the viewer to appreciate that effort?

[reader50]

If you print counterfeit money, it is absolutely worth it to sweat every detail. Multiple people may examine it closely, perhaps even with magnifying glasses. And your freedom could be impacted if the product does not pass inspection. It could test your running ability, and hide & seek skills.

If it isn't counterfeit money, then I'm in andi's camp.

[subego]

It almost undoubtedly doesn’t matter.

When I posted that I thought I had adhesive-backed paper lying around, so there was a question of moving forward with that and inkjet color, or waiting to hunt down the right paper and glue.

Turns out I don’t have any, which means I have to go to Michael’s, which is where I’d get paper and glue anyway.

[subego]

Was about to curse Michael’s for not having the right paper, but it was secreted away on an end shelf.

Also got 6 different types of glue stick to experiment with.

[subego]

I feel the shade should be slightly darker, but good enough.






Bonus wavy cut test. Frequency is too low, but another good enough.

[subego]

Don’t care about the details on this one, such as no ingredients.

[subego]

Built!



Not thrilled with the disjointed scalloping, and I need to find glossy paper.


Edit: used Elmer’s “2X stronger” purple glue stick on this. I like it.

[ghporter]

That color is pretty darn close, and since it is a small detail that establishes the credibility of the prop, even if it were quite a bit off, it wouldn’t really grab anyone’s attention. Nobody will freeze frames to say “ha! I knew they faked that” on your film.

The Lorna Doone package looks authentic. The look has the same “feel” of the product from decades ago, and it isn’t like there are a lot of people who actually collect LD packages.

In general, you want to make the items look inconsequential. Things that will make people snap to the prop being fake are the things that just don’t flow with the prop. “Close enough is close enough” really applies.

Even if there’s a shot of someone showing the cigarette pack with the tax stamp visible, viewers will look at the whole image and feel “that’s legit.”

[Thorzdad]

Originally Posted by ghporter 

In general, you want to make the items look inconsequential. Things that will make people snap to the prop being fake are the things that just don’t flow with the prop. “Close enough is close enough” really applies.

Even if there’s a shot of someone showing the cigarette pack with the tax stamp visible, viewers will look at the whole image and feel “that’s legit.”

This. A bajillion times this. It irritates me to no end when I watch period pieces and every piece of ephemera looks bright, sharp, and shiny new. It always kills the immersion and screams “fake prop!” Props need to look handled.

The two biggest violators (to me) are fleets of cars in period shows and home interiors. Cars in period shows are almost invariably from exactly that year (or a couple years before and after) and perfectly shiny and new, like museum pieces. That’s not how the real world is. A street in 1960, for instance, would have a selection of vehicles spanning from, at the very least, a decade or more ago.

Similarly, most homes are filled with furniture and accessories from a wide timespan. There might be a few pieces contemporary to the setting, but there would also be pieces identifiably from earlier times. No (average) home had only decor of that time. I grew up in a mid-century tract home and, while my parents tried to decorate appropriately with (affordable) mid-mod pieces, there were also pretty obvious pieces that were from an era before. That’s just how reality do.

Your props look awesome, subego. I envy the work. One of my fave parts of being a graphic artist was when I had to build packaging mock-ups. Of course, those were mock-ups of proposed designs, and not period recreations, which would have been really fun to do.

Question...Will the Lorna Doone box be handled? Picked up by an actor? If so, will you weight it a bit, so it has the correct heft of a full box of cookies? I know it’s a little thing, but I should it help help the actor “act” like it’s a weighty thing, rather than an airy, empty box.

[andi*pandi]

^good points. In my house I have everything from 100yo antiques to ikea shelving.

[subego]

Thank you all for the compliments!!!

No plans for the Lorna Doone’s to be handled, but should they be, the weight is correct because I glued the skin to a full box of cookies.

[Thorzdad]

Brilliant move.

[ghporter]

That’s old school prop making, subego. All of Archie. Bunker’s beer in All in the Family was Coors with a prop label over the can. There are a number of other examples of that sort of thing, but I can’t find my references right now.

[andi*pandi]

I would have put him as a Miller or Pabst man.

[ghporter]

I think it had to do with the alcohol content rather than the specific brand/flavor. And I apparently was misinformed. According to The Smithsonian, it was an Anheuser-Busch product. The link includes a photo of a can with the prop label.

[subego]

Originally Posted by ghporter 

That’s old school prop making, subego. All of Archie. Bunker’s beer in All in the Family was Coors with a prop label over the can. There are a number of other examples of that sort of thing, but I can’t find my references right now.

There was a guy around here who used to get on the train and turn on a cellphone jammer. He’d then kick back with a brewski covered in a prop soda label and enjoy the show.