Minions at Work: A Photocomic

Though it isn’t that big, this is one of the more elaborate sets that I ever built. It’s also unusual in that it has a room with an actual ceiling, and am upper “street” level as well. You can’t really tell but the walls of the tunnel also narrow towards to rear to create “forced perspective” that makes the tunnel seem deeper than it is.

As with many of my sets, the various walls and pieces are actually used express shipping boxes (and occasionally mailing tubes for columns) taped closed and covered with contact paper to form “building blocks” that can be stacked together in a million different ways. Some of these boxes get more elaborate modifications, such as the one with a round hole in the middle, or the several see here that have metal vent covers installed in them (with holes in the back for lighting purposes, as with the red backlight on the left). Other have archways or more traditional doors cut in them. This is more complicated than it sounds, since I have to use scrap cardboard and fill in the sides of any opening I cut.

But these blocks are light-weight, endlessly versatile, easy to work with, and look good. Their biggest weakness for me is that they’re bulky to store. Since they’re closed they generally don’t nest together. They’re stacked everywhere, and some of them hang in mesh laundry bags suspended from pulleys on my high, office ceiling!