Historical architecture by Viator - Page 3

**Viator** · #21 07-30-2022, 11:05 AM

German speaking language countries typical tenement house

The old paper model by Bastelbögen scan, printed in 1/300. I added the Geranium flowers, as popular as half-timbered walls, plastered and painted white with dark pillars and beams, however the flowers are not made of paper.

**Don Boose** · #22 07-31-2022, 08:40 AM

I have enjoyed catching up with this project of European buildings, Andrew. They are all very well done.

Don

**Viator** · #23 08-24-2022, 02:48 AM

Well, I finished my first 1/300 model by BUKO, their No. 01 - the Poor Clares conventual church of St Andrew in Cracow, which is my favorite Cracow old building, but I have mixed feelings. The building looks eclectic to some extent because it has early Romanesque main nave, late Romanesque transept and towers, a Gothic side chapel with buttresses and the towers are topped with a Renaissance cupolas, while the interior is overloaded with Baroque decorations. So, the model was complex and interesting, but I found too many flaws and wrong parts as well as the details not in line with the real thing to have a real fun with making of. That's why this time I will share the report of the work step by step to warn the potential followers.

**Viator** · #24 08-24-2022, 03:21 AM

After preparing the base i begun with the part No.1 which os main nave with few sides of towers, the transept (now in the form of a one-sided projection) and few "ceilings". I found this part too complicated and sophisticated, which made it difficult to be shaped and glued together and it made some later work difficult too (especially gluing the roof over the entrance portal between three walls with no access from below to correctly position the roof level and sloping).

This part has few omissions or simplified parts which spoil the final result. The greatest pain was the big, gothic windows, which were simply printed flat on the facade wall. The window in the middle of a front wall was additionally moved to the side due to the making of the walls textures after the photo images, because there is no free space for the photographer to make the proper photo of a front wall perpendicular to its surface.

I cut out this window as well as the transept one and add paper strips around the opening to get the recession.

But the biggest flaw was, that on the opposite (Southern) wall there should be two more windows, as big as these first two, but they were simply absent on the model (!). The model was lacking any "spare textures" or extra parts, and so finally I left the wall blind - "as is".

BTW, the model has no detailed instruction, only the LoRes sketches of the structure with some parts numbered.

**Viator** · #25 08-24-2022, 03:44 AM

But the most dissapointing pieces were the towers.

In the real church the front facade is symmetrical and the roof over the main nave is nearly symmetrical two (the differences not exceeding a milimeter or two in the scale of the model) so the parts No. 1a & 1b should be less or more identical (only mirrored) but in fact they were not. As a result, after gluing together #1a & #1b to the #1 the white area not covered by the roof was some 8 to 10 mm wide (!) and required painting. I used grayish brush pen and the light gray marker, marking the dark boulders, so the resulted texture is similar enough and in the same time it could be distinguished if required.

The pattern on the eight side walls of each tower was exactly the same, "copy-paste", which is annoying.

The side effect of this "copy-paste" system was the existence of a few unnecessary windows / openings in the lower floor of the towers. The big windows were printed around each tower so the additional, unnecessary windows emerged on the surfaces partially covered by the edge of the front roof, while in fact these walls should be blind.

**Viator** · #26 08-24-2022, 04:22 AM

The small porches and a side chapel were okay, except the two bugs, relatively easy to be fixed.

First: the 2 mm wide "tile" on the top of the buttresses (9a & 22) glued to the corners of walls (four of all the five) must be modified to add a triangular recession (the fifth buttress top tile shouldn't be modified!). In this scale the cutout depth mustn't be measured nor calculated - simply cut some 1/2...1 mm. If the cutout will be too big, it will result with only half a milimeter wide gap two milimetres long (between this very cutout and the corner of the wall), but in case it had been neglected, it would have been impossible to press properly the buttresses gluing tabs to the chapel walls and a half milimeter gap along all the vertical edge of the buttresses will emerge, which could spoil the aesthetic effect.

Second: the roof over the chapel shall oherhang its walls for some 2-3 milimeters and so the same gap will emerged (and must be filled with something) between the end of the roof and the main nave end wall (see the last two photo images for reference).

**Viator** · #27 08-24-2022, 04:35 AM

The worst of the remaining parts was the spherical roof or helmet on the semi-circular apse next to the gothic chapel (part No. 12).

As the parts of the model were printed on the approx. 100 g per sqm sheet so very tiny parts are the same thick as the biggest ones, and the additional embossing of the spherical areas was impossible. In my opinion overlapping of the parts will be too much visible too, especially when the parts are non-parallel. So I assumed that the width of the roof segments was calculated properly to make a half-sphere glued edge-to-edge. I made some additional separate tabs and glued them inside, but at the end I got the too loose top areas of the segments, with wide gaps between them, which cannot be connected to one another without the squeezing of the roof and deformation of the base (but the deformation of the base will result in the whole thing diameter reduction, so the roof wouldn't cover the apse at all) and its rear side wouldn't be flat and glued to the flat wall...

I was forced to remove the additional tabs and to glue the base of the roof to the apse and next the segments to one another. After the gluing and removing the tabs, the segments became wet with glue and this perhaps made the suiting them to the shape easier, however the final roof is not impressive (and not in line with the real roof shape), and it required many strokes of the brush to hide the scratches (I did the painting later).

**Viator** · #28 08-24-2022, 05:17 AM

As for towers helmets, I checked the matter and quickly I realised that they are designed as overlapping too. So, from the very beginning I made the gaps between the segments wider while cutting the parts out. I was disappointed with the numerous problems up to now, so I wanted to finish the model as quick as possible and I didn't calculate nor geometrically construct the proper width of the segments. In some areas there are gaps but the remaining areas are connected mostly edge-toedge and to be honest I am quite satisfied with this result.

As usual, the original design was lacking few important features (see the images below) so I made the additional octogonal "bands" out of the one layer of the parts #15 (for the lower part) and #18 (for the upper part of the tower(s)), coloring the other side of these parts with a green Pentel marker instead (of course every edges were shaded as well). If I had the spare textures, I could do more, but I am happy enough with the result.

The top sections of each of the towers, which shall be equipped with one more helmet, the ball and the cross (replaced in the model with an absurdly looking part No. 19) I replaced once again with a simple cone and a longer, little tube (cut out of the inner scraps from the parts No. 15 and 18). Finally, I sacrificed material purity, adding a 2 mm dia jevellers balls and the crosses cut out of the photoetched railings.

The last piece was the fence with the arched gate (No. 21). Of course I cut out the arch in the gate itself (against the instruction), I didn't glued together two layers of the sculptures on the top (I cut off one of them) which allowed me to cut the figures with a lancet more precisely, I added the additional bending lines to the roof and I cut fence ends a little plus I chamfered the end of the leftmost roof 45 degrees to suit to the chapel buttress surface, and I found that the gaps between the inner layers of walls are too wide and so I painted them and finally I relised that even after all these operations the fence didn't exactly suit the plan drawn on the top of the base, but I had enough of this model for the moment.