Night of Wishes
Once again, another project in my little Book Nook series has been successfully completed - and once again, it is a project particularly dear to me personally. With this fourth model, we are in a way returning to the very early beginnings of Kassiopeya: the “Villa Nightmare” from the novel by the incomparable Michael Ende.
As the very old hands among you may remember, I already interprated this particular novel 13 years ago - in a very rudimentary and superficial way. In fact, it was my very first model ever, my first attempt at model building, my first test piece, in which I simply wanted to try out all the new (at that time still completely unknown) techniques of building with Styrodur, plaster and natural materials. As inspiration for this first test piece, I naturally chose this much-loved German children's book classic that had been with me all my life. And at the end of the project, I ended up with an exterior view of the villa as well as the realization that I had finally found my personal favorite creative medium: literary models.
However, while back then (a good 13 years ago) I was of course still far from being able to realize all those ideas and inner images that were buzzing around in my head, today after years of practise I am quite in another place.
And so today I'm finally going into round two of the project, this time to realize the atmosphere and the details that weren't possible back then. Once again, the “Villa Nightmare” will be realized - this time, however, not from the outside but from the inside. This time, the magic laboratory is being built with all its enchanted fumes, recipes and substances... and, of course, the mystical magic cauldron around which the whole story unfolds.
With this in mind, I welcome you to this new photo series of an old passion, welcome to the enchanted laboratory of the evil sorcerer Beelzebub Preposteror, who brews the legendary „Satanarchaeolidealcohellish Notion Potion“ on New Year's Eve to fulfill his contractual obligation of evil deeds. And of course we also meet our two heroes there, who are supposed to prevent the impending apocalypse on that fateful night: a little cat and a precocious raven.
A tour through the laboratory
Building the "Villa Nightmare"
Building the “Villa Nightmare” was above all about building atmosphere. In order to build the magical lab that I had in mind, it was not only necessary to install ambient indirect lighting in the walls, ceiling and shelves, the room also had to appear angled and enchanted, while of course remaining clearly visible.
The practical aspects of the latter proved to be a little complicated - mainly due to the distorted perspective in the construction. Most of you will already be familiar with this this prefered technique of me: The basic idea is to build the room in a distorted perspective and make it significantly smaller towards the back in order to achieve a high depth effect in a relatively small space. With straight, rectangular rooms, such a gradual reduction in scale is actually not a big problem... but unfortunately my little magic lab was not straight... and certainly not rectangular.
On the contrary: in order to achieve an moody fantastic atmosphere, I had in mind an amorphous, curved floor plan with bays and galleries, pretty much the most complicated thing you can do with a room.
Distorting the perspective of such a floor plan proved to be one of the most complicated constructions so far. But with the help of various grids and auxiliary walls, it was finally possible to measure and transfer the room heights in such a way that the perspective finally worked - even if the construction took three times as long as usual.
On the other hand, setting up the small laboratory proved to be a real pleasure. Rarely have I had so much fun equipping a room with bottles, equipment and all kinds of absurd objects as I did with this project.
As always, the photo gallery with the individual construction steps follows in a separate gallery. If you would also like to read up on the details and explanations of the individual construction steps, you can find them in my blog as usual.
And with that, let's move on to the WIP gallery!
