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Whilst searching the Internet for some inspiration I came across a Dolls House which really caught my eye. It was constructed in a Tudor style and as I love building black & whites I had to have a go! |
The building is in 28mm scale, and essentially made up of two boxes. The larger part of the building is what I would call a side apex with overhang (something that I build quite a lot of) with an adjoining single storey outhouse. I drew out my design on squared paper and then transferred this on to a sheet of mounting board, cut each section out with a scalpel and steel rule, then I got to work on assembling it.
As you can see from looking at the picture of the finished piece there is also what I would call a front apex situated at the front of the building. This was simply cut from foamboard and glued on top of the mounting board construction. Once this was dry I painted the carcass with a cream acrylic paint. I build en masse and I find that painting the carcass beforehand gives a much cleaner finish, allowing you to just touch up the panels rather than having to squeeze a paintbrush into inaccessible corners
I put the carcass to one side to dry and moved onto cutting and painting strips of 2mm balsa wood of varying widths. Once they were dry I started to carefully glue them into place with PVA to represent the timbers of the building, making sure that I concealed the edges of the foamboard addition.
The door was pre-painted with the base brown colour used for the timbers and then glued into place. I blacked out the windows before super gluing in the pre painted car body repair mesh, which hopefully looks like leaded windows. I also added thin strips of 1mm brown painted balsa to the windows to make it look as though there was small panes.
Next I measured up to the apex of the roof, doubled it, and added 2mm, this gave me the width for the roof, which was to be cut from 270gsm card. I then measured along the length of the main part of the building to get the length of the roof. This rectangle was cut out, half the width was found and then the card was scored and folded in half. This was glued into
place.
Mounting board is also a good material to make the roof but I have found that the PVA slightly soaks into the card and creates a slightly undulating effect, which looks “olde worlde”. Don’t panic if it looks like a choppy sea to start as the undulations do subside. Make sure that you use a thick card if you want this effect though as a thinner card will create a roof which peaks and troughs way too much. The roof for the outhouse was made in the same way.
The front apex part of the main building were measured and cut in a similar way to the main roof. This piece needed to be able to fit to the angle of the main roof section so I measured from the front of the peak of the apex to where it would adjoin the main section, and again at the base of the apex. This was transferred to the roof section and the resulting diagonal line cut. Don’t despair if it’s not quite right, as the tiles will cover any small gaps.
Strips of card were cut and snipped across their width to make up the roof tiles. These were then glued into place and the whole process was repeated for the outhouse and the front apex roof. Be sure to tile one row at a time on each side on the building, this way you will ensure that you have the same number of rows on each side once you’ve finished. Before the capping strips were added two rectangles of foamboard were glued together and a small V-cut made to rough the same angle as the roof. This was then faced with plastic card, a small square of mounting board was added to the top and a piece of plastic pipe was glued to the mounting board to create the chimney. I repeated this process so that I had three chimneys. I undercoated them in black before gluing them into place and adding the capping strips.
The whole roof (chimneys and pots included) was painted grey and individual tiles were picked out in lighter and darker shades to give a slate effect. The roof (again including the chimney and pots) was then dry brushed in three shades of grey starting with the darkest and working through to the lightest. The timbers were then dry brushed with white and a fuse wire door handle was added. The building was based on mounting board and
flocked.
I think that the building, excluding drying time, probably took about six hours to complete and now resides in New Zealand.