Miniature crime scenes

Since I put in the effort to make little CSI vests for the Playmobile people on my birthday cake I wanted to use them for something else once all the cake had been eaten.

So I put together these little crime investigation scenes just for fun.

"It's bad news son."

Nick and Catherine figure out what the slippers mean.

Did she fall, or was she pushed?

I'm thinking poisoned.

(Yeah, the people in my dollhouse watch ER)

Doc Robins performs an autopsy.

Catherine talking to Greg back in the lab.

A few days after this I discovered the Nutshell Studies by Frances Glessner Lee. This awesome lady created miniature murder scenes back in the 1940s to teach police officers the finer details of crime scene investigation. She also helped to establish a department at Harvard university for legal medicine and was honourarily appointed a captain of the New Hampshire State Police which made her the first woman to hold such a position.

All this from a woman whose parents allowed her brother to go to university but not her. 

source

The 18 dioramas are now kept in the medical examiner's offie at Baltimore city morgue and in 2004 a book was published containing photographs taken of the models by artist Corrine May Botz.

CSI: Cake Scene Investigation

It was my birthday at the weekend!

I turned 21.

My birthday cakes aways reflect my current interests so this year I made it CSI themed.

(See my previous birthday cakes here and here)

The scene was a roadside with a dead body, pieces of evidence and some recently unearthed ground with a shovel.

I used Playmobile people for the team and made little CSI vests for them out of felt.

Here's Jim Brass and Grissom discussing the case.

Greg Sanders looking at a tyre mark.

Nick and Doc Robbins inspecting the body.

Catherine pointing at the dirt, and a suspicious gooey substance is marked.

Here's my friends cutting into the cake to find out what had been buried. The gooey stuff was a clue.

It's gummy bears!!

I didn't want to ruin my cake by sticking candles in it so I put them in the strawberries that were in the middle of the jelly.

It was two-tone fizzy jelly and it was awesome.

Even more tiny little dark things

Here's the rest of the work from my exhibition.

This is Men In Suits Make Mistakes. My tutor said this is his favourite. Did I mention he also said that he finds me fascinating? He totally did. 

Up one end of the box- which used to hold cling film- is a tiny box of matches.

At the other end is a suitcase packed with papers and doused in 'petrol' (dried PVA glue) which runs all the way to the matches.

This piece is called Dirty Playground. The title comes from a quote about Las Vegas from William Petersen who played Grissom in CSI, "Guys lose their wives and money, women end up deciding to stay and become strippers. It's the dirty playground for the Darth Vader in all of us."

*Shudder*

Here's the interior of the club.

And here it is with the lights on.

Thank you reduced price Christmas lights from QD.

And did I mention the lights are colour changing?

Check out the footage.

There's been a murder!

Continuing with my miniature weapons, I made another mini kitchen knife and then went a little Dexter on it. And now it's evidence!

It reminds me of these blood slide candies I saw a couple of week ago for Halloween. They've got the 'ick but awesome' factor.

In a recent tutorial my tutor suggested I watched some CSI as the entire 7th season featured a miniature killer who made miniature versions of the crime scenes before (or after, it's yet to be discovered) committing the murders. I'm only two episodes in but so far it is awesome. Except this model maker used the real blood of their victims in the models. I won't be doing that.