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Building Bookholm
If we leave aside the model of the «Villa Nightmare» (which can be seen as my technical test run for model building), the "Catacombs of Bookholm" was my first true model building project. And of course in my enthusiasm (and my boundless naivety) I underestimated this first major project enormously. Today I'm glad about it, because if I had been aware of the actual amount of work and effort involved at that time, I probably would never have started this mammoth project in the first place. But euphoric as I was, I imagined construction to be quite logical and simple. And accordingly carefree I approached my new project:
I wanted to build Bookholms's catacombs like an ant farm, i.e. as a large earth block, through which the catacomb corridors would criss-cross. Following this vague concept, I stacked 17 Styrodur plates on top of each other, roughly planned the layout of the corridors and the positions of the main settings, and began to cut out the individual plates. That was all my planning at that time. Also, I have (apart from four very rough corridor sketches and a city floor plan) never made any construction plans.
The building process itself was also more intuitive than focused and became, so to speak, a self-runner. I started with the very lowest plates and corridors, worked my way slowly upwards and always worked on those areas that I was in the mood for. In doing so, I always implemented any ideas that came to me either spontaneously or that seemed suitable in terms of location, and so the catacombs slowly grew plate by plate.
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In doing so, I did not miss the opportunity to include references to my own favourite novels and authors in my own «Moerian manner», to capture insiders and thereby create a small monument to my personal favourite authors. In this Bookholm Stephen King is immortalized next to Oscar Wilde, Michael Ende next to Milan Kundera and Frank Schätzing next to Ian McEvan. It is my personal Bookholm.
Of course, despite all the freedom of creation, there were some logical steps to be considered in the individual work steps. Of course, despite all the freedom of intuitive working, there were some logical steps to be considered in the individual work steps. For example, the corridors running inside the block had to be completed before I could paste the next board onto it (logical - 'cause you wouldn be able to reach it afterwards). Also the light chain, with which I wanted to illuminate my jellyfishs, had to be installed at each level of each plate (and thus had to be threaded through all levels during construction). However, all these logical steps came up by themselves little by little. Besides, I had enough time during the endless hours of brickwork engraving, book modelling and priming to think about the next steps.
Back in the days of building Bookholm's catacombs I published the building process only in a model building forum and not on my website (which didn't exist in those days). Unfortunately at that time I neither had very much experience in creating a comprehensible WIP documentation nor a good camera at hand. So the pictures from this period are not of very good quality and resemble rather a sequence of intermediate results, instead of illustrating actual construction steps. In order to make the process of construction more understandable, I have edited all the photos as good as possible, arranged them in a new and more logical order and added some explanations. So in this form I hope it is understandable now.
So, and now to the WIP gallery: