Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Star Wars Craft Time

So, I scored this on Ebay. This was one of my "Holy Grail" items. It was fairly cheap compared to what these are going for, but if you know what these are worth you'll know that these babies can get into $1000's if they are in good shape with a box. So I was happy to get it at the price I paid.


Needless to say, I did not go for the one with a box. This one came with the remote and instructions and all the accessories AND IT STILL WORKS. Popped some batteries in and pulled the remote trigger and.. bzzzz... away it went it goes forwards and backwards, way cool, considering it came out in 1979 or something.



But it looked lonely sitting on the shelf by itself and no box to proudly display beside it. Rather than shell out $600 for a box I decided to make one.

I grabbed as many photos of the box as I could find on various sites and Ebay. I couldn't find any scans though. The Star Wars collecting community is pretty stingy on posting scans of card backs or box scans for fears that bootleggers and scam artist would use them to create pristine versions of the packaging and try to pass it off as genuine. I guess there was a HUGE problem with a few individuals on Ebay that would reproduce card backs and bubbles, then re-card vintage figures and sell them on Ebay for huge sums. To bad for me on this task, but I understand. So the only option was to reproduce one, and reproduce one I did.
I've only gotten to the prototype stage, here is the result of my Photoshop work.



Now I agree its not perfect but I didn't really care, and the original material I found was not that great so I decided not to sweat it, it was only for display so I decided to keep the wrinkles and bends that were in the photos. I think it kinda ads to the recreation.

As a test, I then printed it off and carefully cut it out with a ruler and exact o knife then glued the two ends together after lightly scoring and creasing all the folds.




I think it turned out pretty good. Now I just have to sent it off to the print shop to get it done on large format, higher quality paper since its too big for home printers. I'm in no hurry to do that though.

So, if anyone want to save me some time and has an extra box for the sandcrawler just send it over to me :)!!! ha

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