Hampton Court Palace

[papermodelfan]

Thanks to all for the encouragement, notes and memories. It sound like this Palace has been for decades (centuries?) one of those marvelous public spaces that form the backdrop and stage set for many fun moments. It does for me too, even though I have never been there - as building Micromodels with my father was the beginning of this hobby for me, and even now, though he has trouble talking and hearing, building paper models together remains a deep though non-verbal connection for us.

So to carry on with the renovation. First to resurface some of the exteriors that got damaged by my jigsaw, and replace the towers and assorted chimneys that had gotten lost. The Greenhouse is odd - it sticks out with a little triangle on the plan, as though it had been added to the original model design as an afterthought. Then to finish the build - starting with the building in the extreme northwest corner. (A quick look at Google Earth shows that the main front entrance of this model faces West, so the long axis runs from there to the East.)

[papermodelfan]

Then there is a series of small buildings, like a row of tiny houses, that forms the North edge. These along with some other small structures complete the first packet of parts. The little houses should have chimneys, for which with classic Micromodel style one is encouraged to make from split wooden matches. I will, but am going to wait on that until all the Palace is ready, and then do them all at once. On this model, the hundreds of chimneys and their associated chimney pots are a major feature, and it will be a challenge, like life boats on an ocean liner, to get them to be consistent without getting bored out of my mind.

[papermodelfan]

Then there are the final buildings that finish the Northern exposure. At this point, the edges of most of the buildings are where they should be on the ground plan as far as matching with Packets B and C, (except for the intrusion on to the space for building 10D, over on the left on image #15). Clearly, we had trouble with this 45 years ago, as some of the original model is several mm off target.

The roof ridge pieces are delicately and folded first, then cut from the thin paper and glued along the roof folds - this distinctive Micromodel trick is totally off scale, but works to dress up the model anyway. The chimneys have little black dots showing where all the chimney pots go, and there are hundreds of them to shape from the same thin paper that the roof ridges are on. I am going to wait to tackle this until the end, like rigging. There are also a lot of exposed edges that are white, and the back sides of cornices that are uncolored. I usually water color these, and I am going to wait on that step until the end as well, so that I use a consistent color. Except for those finish details, all the buildings are glued down, and Packet A is finished.

(This much took from Nov 26, to Dec 23, taken in small steps, but then I am slow as a builder)

[D-H]

Pretty darn amazing!

D

[Mike Stamper]

Rob,

That's comming along nicely !

I'm sitting at my computer and comparing my model with yours - it's quite an odd feeling !

You are right about the main entrance. If you arrive by car, you drive down the road almost to the main entrance then turn left, past your building "A1" then right past the small buildings (now offices") then left again into the car park.

I hired a seven seater a few years ago and too some friends there. They whern't too happy about me parking in the car park .... because the "van" had the hire companies name on it!

The green house has the great vine It is supposed to be many hundreds of years old.

Recently they have studdied the building to see what changes were made by Henry VIII. It seems that Thomas Wolsey built the palace in exactly the same style as the Italians built the palaces for the Cardinals - Obviously Henry had to make changes!

You will see the position of the great hall covers areas of earlier buildings and the buildings at the east end were built much later - Late 1600's.

My model is in a small box and I cut a "viewing hole" in the end. It is quite strange how your perspective changes when looking at the main entrance through a hole that is such a low angle.

Cheers
Mike

[papermodelfan]

The second packet of cards has numbered cards 12 through 21, plus two unnumbered cards with parts of the base. All are 3 by 5 inches. Looks like this was the northwest zone of the palace that was built up by Henry VIII, replacing some earlier structures from the Cardinal Wolsey era. Apparently the first was a giant kitchen for cooking dinner for up to 1000 souls, and the Great Hall, where they ate it. So card 12 (second photo below) is that Great Hall (1.25 by 3 centimeters). It is buttressed on both sides by 9 heavy buttresses, and the two end gables look something like the stern of a ship. I find these buttresses the most fiddly bits of the entire model - even more so than the chimneys - and struggle to make the tiny things look uniform. A test fit of the Hall in place on the ground plan shows that it will fit nicely.

The fit of the buildings to the ground plan in general has me worried, so I am not going to glue these down until the entire packet of cards is built. up.

[papermodelfan]

Thought I would illustrate the building of a few individual elements, to give the flavor of these constructions style. Abutting the Great Hall there is a row of buildings (possibly Henry VIII's apartments?) labeled 10 and 10E. For some reason GHeighway decided to construct them as separate boxes, joined under one roof. Is he respecting something about the original groundplan here?

Photo 6 shows the little block 10E on the card (with the combined roof)
Photo 7 same, cut out
Photo 8 shows 10 E glued up , with 10 also
(What did I do with photo 9?)
Photo 10 shows them under the single roof, with a cornice line across that is part of the wall as cut out on one side, and added as a tiny strip on the other. Now - why not just have modeled it as a single box?
Photo 11 shows it dry fit up against the Great Hall.

On the the next... And there are a LOT more of these.

[papermodelfan]

In assembling these photos, taken with the "close-up" camera setting, I see lots of imperfections: chimneys not quite square, edges a little rough, crenellations along the cornices a little uneven, that I did not see with the naked eyebulb. The camera is much more sensitive than my sight, it seems. It is a challenge - I think I may need to go over these again, and square things up a bit. You skilled tiny scale modelers in the Forum have conquered this already - perhaps I need to try magnifying glasses...

Reminds me of a short story I once read, sent to me by a fellow paper modeler, about a man who modeled things in exquisite detail at microscopic scale, pushing into smaller and smaller dimensions, until it couldn't be seen at all, while he himself entered an ethereal mental state, indistinguishable from madness...

[Art Deco]

This is really a great project, including the 45-year old back story!

Rob, I’m glad you included the knife in some photos, it helped me get my head around the scale, and just how amazingly tiny this work is. Hope you are taking frequent eye-resting breaks!

Hundreds of chimneys and chimney pots? Yikes!

Would a small jig simplify the chimney-making process, or help with making them uniformly square?

As for the chimney pots, it would be great if you could mass-produce them. Do you want to stick with original materials? If not ... would spaghetti or round toothpicks have a suitable diameter? If you could slice the tips off an aligned row of pasta or toothpicks, maybe you could make quantities of identical chimney pots at a time. Even better if you could first color all the tips at once (by dipping in ink or paint?), then cutting them off.

[peter taft]

If a paper model was said to be delicious... i would certainly want to eat this one.... Brilliant, abso-bloody-lutely Brilliant will keep watching