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It hit me one day this summer that the small threes/shrubs in my flower bed looked like minatures of regular trees. This led to the idea of building an outdoor village. I settled on 1' = 1" dollhouse scale, as I know I could easily get components for them.
I started in the fall, and built a church and a house. The church is modelled off a church in downtown Wilmington, and the house is based on a cute house near my future in-laws in NE Philadelphia. I took alot of tips from garden scale railroaders for building materials and weather proofing. They took ALOT longer to build than I thought. The combination of that and a last minute trip for work the week before Christmas led to them being completed too late this year, December 27th. I put them out anyway and took some pictures. I plan to build one a year to add to the village. I'm trying to think of ways to incorporate them into my LOR show this year, rather than just having the show happen around them.
Thanks guys! Eventually I plan to model one after my own house, but I want to be sure I have the technique down first.
I'm probably in the 250-300 hour range for the two of them. Most of my family was telling me I should start a business selling them... Materials alone were close to $400 for each one, I doubt anyone would pay enough to make it worth my while!
DanglinModifiers wrote: I'm probably in the 250-300 hour range for the two of them. Most of my family was telling me I should start a business selling them... Materials alone were close to $400 for each one, I doubt anyone would pay enough to make it worth my while!
What did you use for materials? I am especially curous as to how you did the brickwork, it looks amazing.
____________________ Chris
Quiet Corner Christmas
30k lights, 64 channels of LOR, Sychronized to music... Looking to double for 2008...
They're framed out with pressure treated lumber. The walls are PVC sheets. The house has wooden dollhouse siding on top of the PVC. I probably didn't need the PVC under the siding. Though, I wanted to practice using it where I knew I was going to cover it up so that when I needed it to be perfect for the church, I knew what I was doing. The brick is pretty low-tech. I painted the sides with a texture spray paint, then top-coated it brick colored. I then drew in the mortar lines with a metallic gray sharpie. I gave the whole thing a few coats of a matte clear coat, which took down the shine of the sharpie and made it look perfect! It was extremely tedious drawing all those lines. I probably spent 25 hours on that alone!
Here are some pictures of the actual buildings these are based on for anyone who's curious.
Awesome job, they look fantastic. You should at least try to sell one or two and see how it goes. Thanks for sharing the pictures. You definitely have talent!
____________________ Iam still trying to get back underground grrrrr no job right now. US Silver Corporation layd me off and iam out of a job know matter what US Silver Corp says iam a miner and always be a miner so there HA HA HA.
