Here are some photos of my latest kitbash, based on the IHC "Painted Lady" Victorian house kit.
I liked this kit because it has some nice Victorian lines with good detail but construction is fairly straightforward. The main problem is that its prototype in San Francisco is kind of the wrong size/proportion for houses in Sacramento: they tend to be two-story rather than three, and generally not quite so deep. But many architectural features were similar, and I have seen many prototypes in Sacramento that are reminiscent of the Painted Lady style.
At first I resigned myself to simply cutting up the kit to make a smaller house, but then realized that the "left-over" parts were sufficient to create a similar model, only without a front entry and with no right-hand wall. This inspired me to create a model of something seen in many places in downtown Sacramento: an old Victorian home with a small business downstairs. Typically the house will have a storefront added to the original Victorian, extending to the property line, made of brick or wood, but the second-story windows are still visible from the front. The model sits up against the backdrop (which will be disguised by some trees.)
I raided my parts box for this project--a store window casting here, a few extra door castings there, a sheet of Plastruct shingle roof, a couple of swamp-cooler castings, and some assorted styrene bits came together in the right combinations. Both houses were painted with hardware-store spray paint--sky blue and dusty rose--and aged a bit with an ink/alcohol wash to make them look a bit dilapidated.
Here is a shot of both houses, from the front:
Here's a closeup of the storefront, with assorted product signs and tilework (another common feature of this sort of business.)
Here's a three-quarter view, exposing the "Coke" shield, which is one of my strongest memories of this sort of neighborhood market in downtown Sacramento (nearly every one had at least one.)
Here's a back view, showing the alley and rear of both houses. Across the alley is a Faller Victorian, which was built straight from the kit with no significant modification.
There is still a little work that needs to be done: the tilework on the front of the store isn't quite right, which I may just disguise with a store sign.
Oh yeah, if this isn't image-heavy enough, here's a kitbash-in-progress of a Walthers freight house, intended to represent Blue Diamond Almonds' plant:
I liked this kit because it has some nice Victorian lines with good detail but construction is fairly straightforward. The main problem is that its prototype in San Francisco is kind of the wrong size/proportion for houses in Sacramento: they tend to be two-story rather than three, and generally not quite so deep. But many architectural features were similar, and I have seen many prototypes in Sacramento that are reminiscent of the Painted Lady style.
At first I resigned myself to simply cutting up the kit to make a smaller house, but then realized that the "left-over" parts were sufficient to create a similar model, only without a front entry and with no right-hand wall. This inspired me to create a model of something seen in many places in downtown Sacramento: an old Victorian home with a small business downstairs. Typically the house will have a storefront added to the original Victorian, extending to the property line, made of brick or wood, but the second-story windows are still visible from the front. The model sits up against the backdrop (which will be disguised by some trees.)
I raided my parts box for this project--a store window casting here, a few extra door castings there, a sheet of Plastruct shingle roof, a couple of swamp-cooler castings, and some assorted styrene bits came together in the right combinations. Both houses were painted with hardware-store spray paint--sky blue and dusty rose--and aged a bit with an ink/alcohol wash to make them look a bit dilapidated.
Here is a shot of both houses, from the front:
Here's a closeup of the storefront, with assorted product signs and tilework (another common feature of this sort of business.)
Here's a three-quarter view, exposing the "Coke" shield, which is one of my strongest memories of this sort of neighborhood market in downtown Sacramento (nearly every one had at least one.)
Here's a back view, showing the alley and rear of both houses. Across the alley is a Faller Victorian, which was built straight from the kit with no significant modification.
There is still a little work that needs to be done: the tilework on the front of the store isn't quite right, which I may just disguise with a store sign.
Oh yeah, if this isn't image-heavy enough, here's a kitbash-in-progress of a Walthers freight house, intended to represent Blue Diamond Almonds' plant:
