London in Paper by G.A.S.L.I.G.H.T.
(click here to see Part One in this series)
Part 2
First off, remember in Part 1 when I said that research was an ongoing thing? Well since then I've discovered that the Henry Dixon photo gallery I mentioned is only a small part of a larger picture archive called COLLAGE, which stands for Corporation of London Library & Art Gallery Electronic. This is an absolute goldmine of period pictures of London, not just photographs but line drawings and watercolours. It's a commercial site, and claims absolute copyright on all images it contains (selling prints for a not unreasonable £5.95) so although I'm going to use these images as a primary source, I'm not able to copy them to these articles.
So you have your source pictures, and you've got your graphics software raring to go, what next? Well the first thing to do is play around with your chosen software for a bit, learning how it works. The first thing you'll want to learn is how to enable the grid settings on your chosen drawing package. In Corel Draw, that's done through the Grid & Ruler Setup option.
I grew up with the metric system, so that's how I usually work. These settings will give you a visible grid point on screen, corresponding to every 5mm on the finished printout. The grid is what makes life easy for you, helping you keep lines straight, making sure lines join together at set points.
You can see that with Snap to Grid On, the lines are always forced to begin and end on gridpoints, while with Snap To Grid Off, lines can begin and end anywhere. Sometimes you might want to do a little work off the grid, and sometimes you might want to do some work on a finer grid than usual, but these settings can easily be changed while working on a model. But for blocking out the basic shape and size of a building I normally start with one grid point every centimetre or half centimetre.
Before you start, you should be confident of how to do the following basic tasks in your chosen drawing package - draw a straight line between two points, change its thickness and colour, draw a rectangle, fill it with either solid colour or a custom fill, scale and rotate objects
So how to turn a 3d shape into a 2d sheet of paper? A 2d shape that folds up into a 3d shape is known as a net, and there are just two simple nets that will get you started.
The Flat Roof is obviously useful for doing adobe type buildings, or modern tower blocks, but I've found it useful for a lot of London buildings as well. The strongest way to build a flat roof is to fold up the side flaps on the roof and glue it inside the outer walls, so the roof itself is recessed slightly. This gives the structure added strength, and also lets you hide the unprinted paper on the back of the walls. Another way I've seen flat rooves done is to fold down the roof flaps outside the walls, fitting a bit like the lid of a shoe box. Germy has done this with his 25mm Sci Fi buildings, the rooves of which can be removed for play inside the buildings.
One little trick to remember with the flat roof is that you're either going to fit it inside or outside the wall, so it has to be smaller/larger than the wall dimensions by the thickness of your building material. So for example if your building is a 50mm square, and you're using fairly thin card (160-200GSM) your roof should be 49mm square if fitting inside. If you were using much thicker card, take another mm or two off. This is something you'll get a feel for after a couple of test builds.
The Gable Roof is your stereotypical pointy roof, common in European buildings. It's not much more complex than a flat roof, and more forgiving to build. The roof sections have to be larger all round than the walls they're connecting onto to give a realistic overhang, or eave. With the grid it's very easy to do, in fact Corel Draw can tell you how long the slope of the roof is without resorting to Pythagoras's theorem. (I hope to not mention Pythagoras again for the rest of this series, and in truth there are a lot of tricks you can use to figure angles and lengths without resorting to maths, but Mr P's theorem is a lot simpler and a lot more useful than more complicated geometry & trigonometry.)
These two meshes will be the basis of a lot of buildings. Larger models might see the walls split up into two or even four sections and joined together by tabs, but they all boil down to these two basic styles. There are more complicated building shapes out there, but lets walk before we run OK?
So to the first model, and I decided to go for a simple one to warm up. Go to Collage, and enter the image number 25354 in the Search Collage box and click the Search button. The image it brings up (click on it a couple of times to bring it to full size) is of three buildings on Fleet Street, and the building I'm modelling is the boxy one on the left with the awning. It's a simple shape, without too much detail visible, so it's a good starter.
Looking at the picture, I start out by sizing the whole model. Now scale model purists may shriek, but I'm doing a building for wargaming rather than an accurate replica of the original, and besides I've only got a single ¾ view picture to go off, so I'm going to build it to several arbitrary dimensions. I'm building these for 28mm figures, which despite the name are going to be more like 30-32mm in height. So I settle on about 50mm height per floor, and doorways will vary between 30mm and 40mm in height depending on how grand they are. So this four-storey building will work out around 200mm tall, and I arbritrarily decide on a 90mm square base area.
The building basically looks like a flat roof construction, but with some sort of angled section on the roof behind the false front, and the wall on one side seems to be angled up almost like a gable to meet the chimney breast. This isn't a problem, we can build it as a flat roofed building for now and add the other bits on later.
On the front we have some three dimensional relief we need to represent. The moulding around the top of the front wall, and the lintel below the windows on each floor. Since physically modelling these details will be too fiddly, we need to handle this graphically in the model. Starting with the lintel, you can see the 3D effect largely comes from the shadows it casts on the wall below and to the right. This is very easy to emulate with a dark grey shadow line along those sides, placed below the raised part of the lintel like so.
See how it now looks 3D? Just like an ink wash on a miniature figure, only less messy! We can do the same with the moulding at the top, and in fact anything that sticks out from the wall surface can benefit from this treatment. I find dark greys work best for shadows, or darker versions of the base background colours. Don't use thick black lines, they just look too bold. You can get a similar effect with just one line underneath the object, which looks as though the sun is directly overhead.
Onto the windows. There are two ways you can draw the windows in a card building. The first is to draw what's visible inside. There are limits to how much of this you can do, you might want to draw some produce inside a shop window, but the resulting model runs the risk of looking a bit cartoony, unless you're a very good artist. The alternative is to rely on the fact that from many angles all you'll see in a window is a reflection of the sky. A plain, very pale blue works well in window panes. But Corel Draw can improve on that with its custom linear fills. Put into English, Corel can fill a shape with graduated colours, from dark at one end, light in the middle and back to dark at the other. Graduating between light blue and white gives a nice reflected highlight effect.
But the building we're looking at has curtained windows, and again Corel Draw comes to the rescue with a quick Special fill option called Drapes, which looks like folds of fabric.
Whatever the window style, I like to build the window larger than it will eventually be on the model, two or three times larger in fact, and shrink the window down to size once it's finished. Start with the outer frame in roughly the right proportions. Then do a single box inside that and give it the chosen window texture. Next, draw in the inner window frame, leading etc. I do this with thick grey or black lines, but remember, if you're going to shrink the finished window down at the end, then Corel Draw won't shrink the line thickness down to match, so work with finer lines than you want to end up with. Now is the time you might want to change the grid size down to one per millimeter so you can get the proportions on the window inner frame exactly right. Finally when you're happy with it, group all the items in the window together and then resize it down to the finished size. Now with a little copy & pasting, you can use the single window you've drawn multiple times (hint for Corel Draw users, instead of Copy and Paste, use the Duplicate function. It works much quicker)
Normally I'd take the finished window and put a shadow underneath it, but these windows sit directly above the lintel and don't have drop shadows in the picture, so I'll just leave them as is.
Well that's the theory and a fair bit of the front detailing covered. Next time I'll look at the ground floor window & door, and the roof, and we'll see how the whole building comes together. As ever if you have any suggestions, comments or questions, feel free to contact me at
Useful Links & Inspiration
http://collage.cityoflondon.gov.uk/ COLLAGE Electronic Gallery
http://www.cmhpf.org/kids/Guideboox/RoofTypes.html - A handy page on an educational site which shows numerous styles of roof.