Episode 11: Nick Infield

Chatting with California-based modeler Nick Infield represented a couple of firsts for the podcast: Two of the three of us were in person (Nick was in Chicago working on a TV set, thanks to his day job as a focus puller or second assistant cameraman), and we got to dive deep for the first time into an aspect of the hobby your hosts love most: box dioramas! Nick has earned an international reputation for his boxes—many of which touch on his other passion for film—and his was one of the first artists galleries we added to boxdioramas.com. You can see all of his boxes here, but as always, several photos follow of specific pieces we discussed in this episode. (Since we also mentioned Shep’s box dioramas, all of them can be found on this site in his gallery here.) Finally, we offer some useful tips when sculpting or converting for scaling your work. Thanks as always for listening!

Nick (at right) and Jim in the Chicago “studio”; photo by Carmel Carrillo, who also designed our logo.

Jim pick #1: “Elvis Has Left the Building.” As befits someone from the film world, where collaboration is key, Nick occasionally works with other artists, and Elvis was sculpted by Mike Good.

Barry pick #1: “Robin Hood”

Jim pick #2: “Five Minutes, Mr. Karloff.”

Barry pick #2: “Casablanca.”

Scaling your work: Alas, these helpful cards and rulers are no longer in production, but you can find images on the Web and create your own, as well as resizing photographs to the scale of the figures you’re working with to match the anatomy and poses, easily done in Word, as Barry and Jim discuss at the end of the episode.

A fantastic product, these see-through scale cards are, sadly, no longer manufactured. Posted below is an image of several Jim has, scanned at full-size so you can print them out on your own. (We would not do this if they were still available; respect creators’ copyrights!)

As we discussed, it is also very useful to find images of the poses you want to sculpt or convert, save them, paste them into Microsoft Word, and scale them to the size of the figure you want to create. We both do this a lot. Some very useful (and not always safe for work) sites that host images of models in many poses can be found here, here, and here.