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The Hirst Art Studies | Miniatures 

Introduction:

While I was cutting the baroque façade I thought about cutting the next one already. This project of facades must become a series of different houses that date from different era. In fact that is what you see in ancient cities, different houses from different materials, styles and dates all packed together nicely. This next house is a late medieval type of house almost fully built out of wood.

The house I was focusing on was one of the two last remaining wooden houses in Amsterdam called “Het Houten Huys”. This wooden house is built around 1470 and is situated in a beguine court in the hart of Amsterdam.



While surfing the internet I came across a much more beautiful medieval example called 'De Duivels' (the Devils). This is a wooden medieval house that dates back from around 1545-1550. Immediately I started to draw the façade to the desired scale and started on my second façade.



The cutting process:

The Styrodur form for this façade is build up out of 6 different levels. While drawing the house I decided to speed up the cutting process by roughly making the elevations in the form. After a messy cast I got my basic plaster block to work with.



Starting from the top down I sketched the decorative trim of the roof. I sketched one side and copied on to the other side.



The inner part was the cut back about 5 mm. Next step is cutting back the areas around the horizontal beams and windows about 2 mm and adding the vertical wooden structure on it.



Being very pleased with the top part the next phase was quite a challenge. The largest part of the middle section is build up out windows with a lot of tiny parts. Fun to cut but I had to stop several times because of cramps in my right hand.



The windows are carved in on all 4 sides after they are scratched diagonally. The last picture above this text show the windows in three stages. Carved in, scratched and finished. After the windows/glass is scratched al the side of each glass part get a final cut to sharpen the lines between the glass and the wooden structure around.



120 tiny glass windows are done! As I said a lot of work but it looks great.

The part above the door is being removed after which I started working on the left and right side of this area. First I made the curved form that connects the street level to the level above. After that I worked on the windows and the woodwork and made the diagonal window pains above the door.



The final stage of the façade is the floor. Again a lot of windows and the only part where we find some brick structure. If I am not mistaken there are 270 tiny windowpains in this facade.




In the end I think this version of “the Devils” looks reasonably alike the original. This façade will be complemented with a second one that I hope to cut at a later stage. For now this is the report on the second façade which will be updated once the façade is cast in resin and painted.

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