I have long been admiring tiny houses in windows of stores – way back when I was travelling in France with James in 2003 / 2006 I saw clay villages and houses like this (found here):
And since then i’ve seen them in people’s houses or shop windows, or while I was at the hairdresser on Saturday, on Etsy
Of course Houses are a theme of mine, and I’ve made them in 2 and 3d for a long time. Then this house lead me back to making 3d ones on my birthday, a month ago.
This weekend I made 3 small houses out of 2 x Alexa boxes and a pet food box (for the size more than anything else).
They are not big, but bigger than thumb sized! The two smaller ones are 10 x 10 x 18, the larger one is 10 x 15 x 38cm).
I covered them in a layer (or two) of kraft paper, recycled from Mitch’s woolworths bags. The windows are cut on my cricut from magazine pages with appropriately colourful themes (one teal/aqua image I have been saving for months, not knowing quite what to do with it). I think next time I might use some old works on paper of my own, to get a more consistent feel to the colours.
As with much of my collage I only see the next step, so I often discover I don’t have more of that perfect paper (the teal page only did enough windows for two houses). The third one I found an old Frankie Magazine page that was mostly charcoal coloured, and I drew some squiggles with the Posca pens (what else, these days?) to randomly give it colour, which worked out well.
The roofs are from some beautiful full colour divider pages in What Makes a Masterpiece (a book whose insides have already become collage here and here at least). The divider pages have chapter numbers. In the video you will see each roof has a number on it, but in fact only number 5 lives on – i have covered the gorgeous blue grey roof (with a posca marker), and added a stripe of the charcoal Frankie page to cover what was a red piece on the roof (i found the red pulled my eye away from the other more muted colours. Look towards the end of the photos below to see it.
The tiny village sits in my loungeroom for now.
