Miniature Buildings

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Wallis Manor

Just for a change; a piece of my own work. This has been a project with an inordinatly long gestation period. Begun, postponed, forgotten, resumed, delayed and eventually resumed during the 2020 lockdown. Then thwarted by quarantine and resumed again in 2021. Getting back to it was inspired by some of the great work of members of the 'Mostly card & paper' Facebook group. Among whom I would give a special mention to the inspirational Pickwick Line.

I think Wallis Manor fits, just, inside the mostly card and paper definition. Or maybe not.  It's not an issue for me.  I'm not purist and there are several sorts of wood used, and some plastic strip.  But it is 'scratch built'.  The only bought-in components are the Scalescenes slate roof texture and the ??????.

The core of the project is a hand-crafted wall and window texture laboriously designed in Photoshop Express - a program I am very happy with.  The original inspiration was a random Georgian House found with a Google Images search.  I'm afraid I have no idea where it is.  Way outside my range it is pretty much my dream house.  The main frontage has been copied as closely as I coud but the sub-basement and the door portico have been abandoned as I went along.  The roof detail owes more to another photo.

A long time ago a photo was imported of some sampled stonework but the original image is long gone.  It has been copied, pasted, overlaid and tweaked to generate the pattern I have now.  It has also been recoloured.  I love this feature of Photoshop.  The ability to darken, lighten, change colour saturation and to increase or decrease the proportion of the basic process colours.

The window sizes were set as multiples of stone sizes and marks set for the necessary cut-outs in the wall.  The layer system in Photoshop enables the sheet with the window detail to be precisely aligned.  Working to a scale of 1/76 I set the resolution at 608 pixels per inch such that 1 pixel equates to 1/8 inch.  Using the weird hybrid equivalent of 4mm to the foot the setting is 240 pixels/cm.

These are not photo images with subtle borders but drawn pixel by pixel with hard lines.   Not to everyone's taste but I like the way it enables me to produce multiple variants.   The red strip highlights for me where I will eventally position a window sill. Made from wood or styrene strip rather than card - for greater precision.

(If you are not familiar with Photoshop at all or want to follow my workings in detail I am going into a lot more detail in a Walls in Photoshop article.(still under construction)

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David, January 2021