The Amazing Miniature White House

Okay, loyal fans; I promised a post on the amazing three-story miniature white house replica, and as I’ve said, I always keep my word! It may take a while, but it will eventually materialize.

This subject wasn’t as easy to research as I thought it would be… I first saw this miraculous creation in a book that a friend of mine brought to work for me to look at, when I was going through one of my “miniatures phases”. When I began to research it, I discovered that the vast majority of what’s on the web seems to consist of: 1) In which museum the work is making it’s appearance (mostly outdated, and all museums seem to be named after former presidents), or, 2) Books you can buy about the creation of above-mentioned White House miniature.

They even did “The White House Under Construction”!

There is a “rule” that miniatures artists universally adhere to, which is that everything is created on a very precise scale; the most common ones being one inch to one foot (the one that this white house is based on), 1.25 inches to one foot, and 1.5 inches to one foot. With that in mind, think about the fact that the “miniature” white house is 60 feet long by 20 feet wide!

The artists, John and Jan Zweifel (along with a team of volunteers) spent more than 35 years to research, design and construct it. That’s a long time. I mentioned in my other post on miniatures that people devote large chunks of their life to building a single “house”. It simply doesn’t sound fair to call them “dollhouses”. Many are recreations of a certain time period in history, with painstaking, almost painful, attention to detail and accuracy, providing a fascinating view of history.

This replica of the White House is a stunning example of just that. Every miniscule detail of every room has been recreated, and I mean every detail. Furniture is hand-carved (imagine for a moment how much furniture is in the White House!); miniature paintings match the exact colors of the original works of art, and there are hundreds of tiny working lights (including the crystal chandeliers). Even the carpets are reproduced stitch by stitch. In one of the sites I was on, it said the telephones actually worked, but I can’t for the life of me figure that one out. Are there little miniature living people in there who can use these working telephones? Nothing surprises me anymore.

When one continues to ponder about how many other things were probably reproduced in miniature (china, dishes and cookware, clothing in closets, personal items on desks, flooring, drapes, framed historical documents, etc., etc., etc.) it truly boggles the mind.

After doing my research, I’m certain that the book that I saw was by “Gail Buckland“…There are far too many links to it to choose one particular one, so if you’re interested, just google it, please.

Enjoy!
Leslie

The world’s fascination with minature “things”

As I have mentioned, I am a jack of many arts and crafts, master of none. I just like to play. I got on a “miniatures” kick for a while. Like gourd art and pine needle art, there are millions of people in this world who are simply hooked on tiny things. People have spent large chunks of their lives creating one miniature house. There is a miniature of the White House somewhere, completed down to the smallest possible detail. I’ll look that up right after I finish this post. Please keep in mind that most of these things I did years and years ago, and like so many things I’ve done, seem very amateurish to me (my own worst critic, the curse of the artisan), but they were all gifts, and people just loved them! That’s the important thing.

Suddenly, out of the blue, the urge overcame me to create a minature room. I was like Richard Dreyfuss in that movie “Close Encounters of the Third Kind“. I didn’t want to get into the entire doll-house hobby, I just had to make a small room. Absolutely everything that I used came from “stuff” that I had collected over a lifetime… I could open my own crafts store. Not really, but I try to stay out of them, because I go insane and buy things I don’t need, didn’t go in the store for, things I didn’t even know existed.

The structure itself is just some thin wood cut with a dremel, the “hardwood floor” and the roof are popsicle sticks, also cut with a dremel (one of my favorite tools: stay tuned for an exciting dremel post!), and all stained. The headboard, lampstand and table legs are just small dowels, the pictures on the wall were cut from old greeting cards. The bedspread, pillow and rug were all painstakingly sewn, quilted and embroidered (I was really on a mission!). I cannot remember what I used for that lampshade; I believe it was part of a plastic bottle that I decorated. My Mom loves it. That’s the great thing about Moms; they love everything you make from age two for the rest of your life. And believe me, I’ve made some things that only a mother could love!

Take for instance this little pin or magnet or whatever is was, also made from junk lying around the house.

Another really nifty and well-received project that I did on and off for a few years was making 3-D Christmas cards from miniatures. Some of them couldn’t exactly be classified as “cards”, because I got carried away with the 3-D thing, and they were more like “shadow boxes”, but their purpose was the same. My sister, who is one of those people you can’t buy for because she already has everything, has always told me that this is her favorite thing that I have ever sent her for Christmas…. I made several of these, and they were big hits, always from just more junk I had lying around the house.

This one is the first 3-D “Christmas card” that I created… To this day, my sister (I have two of these who are impossible to “buy” for) and her family break it out every year and give it the place of honor somewhere in their beautiful home. Go figure.

It was great fun; I just built a replica of a fireplace using balsa wood, scraps of this and that, and popsicle sticks. I glued fabric for “wallpaper” and incorporated some parts and pieces of “found” odds and ends, Christmas decorations, and “stuff” I had in my misc. crafts supply collection. The “photos” above the mantle are clips from magazines with frames made from stained miniature popsicle sticks, which one can buy by the box, as well as the regular sized ones. These same type of sticks were stained, cut with my trusty dremel, and glued with a glue-gun to create the bricks. Once you start digging through your old un-used crafts supplies, broken jewelry and just junk found around the house, you have art in the making!

Then, of course, my “getting carried away” mode kicked in, and the “cards” began to get more and more elaborate. Just by going through your old Christmas decorations and cards that you “can’t bear to throw away ” will give you a ton of material to work with. In the one pictured below, I was later told by my sister that the flamingo (which was a tree ornament), was a collector’s item worth about fifty bucks, but hey, it’s in the name of art. Inside of that window with the lace “curtains” is a Christmas tree completely decorated.

Are you one of these people who can’t bear to throw away the most special of the Christmas cards that are sent to you? Well, I’ve just told you one of the ways you can utilize them, and here’s another great idea I was given by an elderly lady; she cuts out the prettiest parts into a rectangular shape (parts with no writing on the opposite side), folds them in the middle and uses them for those “to” and “from” tags you attach to the packages! Is that a great idea or what?

My First Experience at painting a Mural

After I painted about a hundred cans (see my post on creating art from tin cans), I was hired to paint a mural. It was in a very nice backyard, behind a swimming pool. I had been using strictly acrylic paints up to that point, for almost anything I had ever painted, but this was such a much larger area, I thought I would need small cans of latex, such as are sold in large home-improvement stores. WRONG. Do not attempt to do this (in my opinion).

I bought five cans of the primary colors; red, blue, yellow, white and black, thinking that I could mix any color I needed with those. The problem with this is that one cannot paint a mural in one day, one week, or in my case even in one month! So you end up having to mix every color you need, then trying to match it the next time you go to work on your masterpiece.

It was torture. Finally, after about two weeks, I gathered up every bottle of acrylic paint I had (about 30 or 40), and carted them to “the site”….. What a difference that made! There was, of course, still some mixing of colors involved, but nothing like what I was doing with the latex, besides the fact that latex was messier and dried up faster on my “palette” (a plate). And the little bottles of acrylics go very very far; I could cover much more area than I had thought with them. Also, acrylics come in so many colors that you could never in a million years mix from those small cans of latex paints; like the bright, bright pinks and purples, etc. And they’re so cheap.

Another very important lesson I learned is always paint from left to right (assuming you’re right-handed), and from up to down. Otherwise, you get wet paint on your hand and smear it on the masterpiece. Boy, does that ever suck. Then you have to mix those same colors yet again, and fix what you messed up. You will see some examples of this (on the gray background) in the photos below. It is much easier to fix the mess on the background than in the actual painting, when the owners have a can of matching paint.

The sun in the middle I can not claim credit for. It is a metal-work that they wanted me to work around. I certainly did work around it. I have this problem. I’ve had it all my life. I don’t know what causes it. I have to outline everything in black, which is a painstaking and torturous process…. (See the “carried away” portion of my post on creating art from tin cans).

It drives me insane. If I didn’t have something in my psyche that causes me do this, life would be much easier. When I started this mural, I told myself, I will absolutely not outline anything in black.… Then, I got the first part of it done (the tree with vines), and I said to myself, “self, I will outline only this part in black, because it just needs to be so. The rest I will leave as it is”. Hohoho.

Of course I ended up outlining the entire thing in black. WAIT, There was one tree I didn’t outline. Because the gentleman who owned the house kicked me out. I mean, these were my good friends, but I had been there for so long, and they were so sick of me being there, that he finally (being the very wise person that he is), gave me a cut-off date. He said “Look, here’s the deal; we liked it the way it was two weeks ago. You’re nuts. You must go away by June 1st and not come back unless we invite you”. I was not working by the hour, it was a flat rate, but I probably would have been there until we were all very, very old if he hadn’t said that. I was just as weary of going there day after day as they were of me invading their space, so I was ecstacic when I got this news. I simply don’t know when to stop.

I have a psychological condition whereas I think that a black outline makes things stand out more, and gives a cleaner and neater appearance. My Mom says it’s just “my style”. So, scattered throughout this post are some photos of my first attempt at a mural, some of the befores and afters. Everything I paint looks the same. I am stuck in the 70s.

Tags: mural, mural painting, mural problems, mural challenges