3D printing using ABS or even PLA has proven to be more resilient than the older plastics has. ABS would be the choice of material for your little Gamins. Plus you can get a lot of detail into your models than in the past.

If I were 25 years younger, and able to travel, I might have give it a shot. But I think I'll just whine about the Good Old Days instead.

If you got access to technical drawings and/or the original pieces, then we can start. I don't have access to a CAD program, but it would not take too long to fabricate a scanning platform to digitize a model.

Is the purprose of this to just "make one?" I'm not sure what you're proposing?

I think you're misunderstanding what he's talking about. The plastic he's referring to is the backing on the ZIPaTone that he used to get the dot patterns on his drawings. Simply put it was a series of different dot / texture patterns on a plastic sheet that you just cut to the desired shape, pull off the backing which protected the adhesive surface and lay it down where you want it. It was popular many decades ago but it has a tendency to discolor and peal after several years.

In this case, it would be easy to digitally paint out the zipatone, and then all a grey-scale background. Heck, it would be easy to colour the whole thing.

I always thought you left your art intentionally light on shading just for that reason, to color it in at a later date. I've seen your shaded / toned work and it's excellent but most of what you've done seems to me to have been "coloring book" style. I would LOVE to see more of your older work colored. It would be most awesome.

Most of it was black and white, but there wasn't much pressure on me to do a lot of colour work because it was too costly in those days to reproduce. There was little you could do with colour work other than sell it, and then it was *gone*. Over time, though, it easier and easier to display colour work digitally. The thing was that this amounted to, "I got this great idea! Why don't you do even more work for free. I'm not paying or this, naturally." So what was coloured was limited by either paying customers or what I was genuinely enthusiastic about doing.

Man I hear THAT!
I'm glad you got enough of both (commissions and interest) to make some really nice pieces.

This doesn't bode well for the drawings I did when I was experimenting with zip tone shading back in the early 1980's. I guess I'll be in for a round of digital restoration if I ever run across them in present day.

Good old Letrasets.. I kinda miss them. For some reason the dot patterns were always the hardest to use.

Gamins galore!

Also, those old letratone / zip-a-tone dots trigger a definite nostalgia.

My Airfix kits were never this interesting...

*smiles very big...

V.

I fooled around with that stuff in the early 90s, very briefly and rather expensively. I remember it being friggety and rather unforgiving. Fortunately for me, acquaintance with Photoshop was only a couple-few years away by then, where you could fake-dot-up your art to your heart's content. Now it's a single, reversable button on Clip Studio Paint. Hey, if we were ALL 25 years younger... :)

I often wish I had never touched Zipatone.

If I was twenty-fife years younger I would be thirty five years old. Hum, that might be useful. I used zip-atone and press letters on my NAR newsletters and original anthro-zines, in Texas heat they age shrank into wadded little plastic trash. That taught me not to store originals in the garage.

I remember these little guys. They were a cute idea and a novel take on the old House Gremlins. :D

Interestingly, they all look like they were molded from horrified/confused alcohol victims :3