Lately I have moved away from painting and other 2D pursuits, and focused more on building 3D miniatures of various environments, many inspired by the New England landscape and the Cape Ann area in which I live.
I enjoyed making and painting models, and miniatures since I was a child , but after a long period of mostly graphic design, painting and illustration work, i have returned to the pleasures of making little things. I use a variety of found materials, things that have been discarded or would be considered junk by most people, bits of cardboard and Masonite, bits of wood, oddly shaped rocks, shells, plastic packaging, odd pieces of cloth, sponge or packing material. I rarely buy the materials that I work with, in fact I pride myself in constructing with mostly found or free materials.
One of the first of these projects was a miniature of a houseboat that can be seen sitting in the Annisquam River as you drive up Route 128 towards Gloucester.
This always caught my eye and fired my imagination. I had recently moved to Gloucester from Salem, so I had no knowledge about the boathouse and no way to obtain any, and that lack of information fired my imagination. I was always wondering who owned it and lived on it each summer. Visually it really caught the eye both because of it's location, light aqua color and the fact that it sat by itself in a little bay of the river, with no other houseboats anywhere near it. I also loved that there was often a sailboat , or skiff parked next to it, like some kind of nautical commuter service. It always seemed to me like the kind of place a mermaid would live if they had a human partner.
I may have become a little obsessed with it. I would often take photos of this place from different vantage points around the bay, there were several places to pull off of 128 for a better look, and an Essex County Greenbelt property very close by. Once I had collected enough photos covering the houseboat from every visible angle, I decided to make a small model of it.
I used cardboard, balsa wood, toothpicks and cut paper. I even fashioned a little couple , mermaid and her partner, out of cut paper. I painted it up with acrylic paint, and used a gloss acrylic medium to put a shine on the water. The base is about 8" x 7" and the whole thing is about 3.5" high. Since building this first model, I have created several more, which I will post later.
