Windmill Maquette

Maquettes can be made roughly and quickly, and still provide plenty of useful information.

Here’s an architectural maquette made of foam core board assembled with a glue gun. It only took about two hours to cut out and stick together. The whole thing is about six inches long, with toothpicks for the windmill spars. As a maquette, it's no beauty!

I spray-painted it gray to make it photograph better. White tends to bleach out in the photo. You can see how the bumpy texture of the paint and the ragged inner surface of the foam board really shows up in the “halflight,” or the area where the form is turning into shadow. The textural effect is strongest on the tail fin and on the side plane of the tower.

There’s also an interesting cast shadow to the right of the cluster of buildings, with cool upfacing planes, and little slivers of light on the edges of the buildings and the terraces.

This is the kind of information I needed from the maquette as I developed the final painting, even though the form and design ended up quite different.

Please check back again tomorrow, and I'll explain more about texture in the halflight, because it's the key to painting dinosaurs convincingly in direct sunlight.