I made these two shops as prototypes for a Wild West Town planned by Foundry in the year 2000. The plan came to nothing as with so many plans of that period, but here they are anyway. I posed them for the photographs with some of the simple-but-evocative figures sculpted by Mark Copplestone. These images want to tell a story of frontier life, but sadly the blue sheet background is a bit too hard to ignore!
The models were made primarily out of balsa wood, although again I built and cast a little range of windows, doors and so forth. The "tarpaper" roof was just made from masking tape. Balsa makes a great representation of grained wood in miniature. What you do is to brush quite hard along the gran with a suede brush. This strips out the softest fibres, leaving you with an enhanced grain. Once this has a solid black undercoat on, it responds very attractively to successively lighter drybrushes.
Fantastic once again - you must have been ahead of the times when these were created - there are now quite a number of very nice mdf Old West buildings available commercially!
ReplyDeleteSuperb work!
ReplyDeleteBeautuful!
ReplyDeleteFabulous work and so much better than the commercial mdf-stuff! Great to see you posting your lovely models ... I've collected all the pics I could find about your work over the years, always a fantastic inspiration!
ReplyDeleteThankyou all. I particularly appreciate your comment Michael, and can promise you there's a lot more to come, and the recent stuff is the best.
ReplyDelete