Our friends Chris and Chandra from Geek Girl Productions at our NYCC booth. Photo from knightmare6′s flickr stream.
Geek Girl at NYCC
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Zero Hour
One last shoot before Rachel departs!
Portraits in a Room With a View
Pinups from Government Archives 2 – The Women Who Make Your Howitzers
This series was shot in 1944 by Howard Hollem (for the Office of War Information, and thus these images fall under the Public Domain) on assignment at the Heil Manufacturing Company. Our favorite is Helen Ryan for still strutting in her heels….
Agnes Cliemka
Angeline Kwint
Elizabeth Little
Helen Ryan
Lucile Mazurek
Mary Betchner
A Room With A View – Part II
Back for more? ‘Cause here’s your chance to see a little bit more of Rachel before we change locations.
Creating A Room With A View
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Room With A View Background  Detail of Window  Space Auto-Generated  Starscape  Starscape Detail  Planet Detail       
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For Rachel’s space window, we had to create two backgrounds, the window itself, and the starscape behind it. For the windows we sifted through hundreds of photographs of metalwork, from fireplace grilles to fences to earrings, anything that captured the filigree look we wanted. We leveled all the bits and pieces to keep all the metal in the gold/bronze/copper range and composited them together.
The hard part was the starscape. Most starscapes start their life as a big field of black and white noise (see Space Auto Generated above). And after equal parts erasing and painting that it eventually becomes something resembling stars. Add a few layers of glow and blur, and then, you’re onto space.
Pinups from Government Archives 1
Howard Hollem was a photographer working for the U. S. Office of War Information (OWI) from 1941-1943. His assignments included military bases, aircraft manufacturers, and even documenting Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia. While we use some of his architectural and landscape photos for creating our backgrounds, we especially love his photographs of young men and women at work.
We kick off our launch with his photographs of Dorothy Cole. An entrepreneur and artist, she was doing well as a sculptor and tile designer when she began to focus her energy on the war effort. She reconfigured her basement into a workshop for tin plating and began producing valves and needles for blood transfusion bottles.
Rachel Gets Cozy For SteamPunkBetties….
We managed to grab up a few minutes with our gorgeous launch model, Rachel Lapidus, and ask her a bit about her life, goals, words to live by and what it means to be a New York Girl. Continue reading
A Room With a View – Part I
Longer and saucier, as promised.
               
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Downtime
Aside
Downtime tonight will be regrettable, but necessary….