Saturday 16 August 2014

The weeks fly by when making miniature houses

Another week has gone, been very busy designing and building a new room box idea for our local miniatures group. As mentioned last week I am designing a helical Art Gallery of room box's. I ended up going with a double helix to keep the height down. It now stands at a little over 1400mm high and 1350 across the base. It includes a spiral staircase and working lift in the center of the building. photos below are of the first test box.



The glass is just sitting in for the photos and only some of the structure is painted as my credit card has been illegally used in Japan and we are sorting out with the bank so haven't gone off to buy more of the framing colour to paint the bottom frame and to make up an exterior colour yet. The 2 grey walls are curved to match the arc of the interior lift well and the end flat wall is connected to the floor to slide out as a unit to set up your display. The notch in the bottom of the floor in the top photo is to allow the box to connect to the box below by overlapping 2 segments. The large glass wall to the left lines directly above the last glass frame to the right so will end up as a set of glass steps. I have also come up with the idea for a variation to become a modern house miniature of 5 rooms around a central atrium. A bit different than the Art Gallery but based from the same source.

I finally did find a little bit of time to work on the theater, have been working on the drawings and have assembled the basis for the front wall and the box's for 3 shops. Picked up some more mdf this morning and the paint since I started this posting so that now I can continue cutting and assembling the theater and some more work on painting the Gallery. The shops are approx a scale 22ft deep x 16ft wide x 12ft high. The shop box's are designed to drop down through the table to be dressed and finished. I will want to finish the entire structure before starting on all the myriad of details to start bringing it to life. I intend that this will be a fine scale miniature when completed so their will be lots of detail work to follow.



The first shop (shop 4) as you can see from the photo above has a chunk out of it because of the entrance into the foyer. As I have said earlier I am trying to find out what the original shops where, but if not I'm thinking of a  barbers in the far left (shop 1) It was one according to a 1937 photo, a flower shop (shop 3), a sweet shop in the above room (4) and a " I've forgotten for now" in shop 2.

Yours in miniatures

1 comment:

  1. Impressive, Warren.

    It is interesting how the addition of a model person takes the mind into a suspension of credibility trip; stories start to develop.

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