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October 2026

I had an interesting comment yesterday on my Instagram page (@btmodelhouses): Someone asked me ‘how do you get from the photo to building the model’, when they saw a reel where I had one of my model house fronts, a work in progress, on my bench with my I-Pad just next to it, showing a picture of the house at about the same size. This is how I work when it comes to the last stage of the process. Painting a model requires intense study to replicate the colour and texture of the bricks, the changes in tone and hue caused by perhaps a hundred years or more of grimy rain depositing Victorian soot in streaks down the surface. The paint is built up in slow layers in just the same way, washes of colour, starting with the lightest tones of red oxide, yellow oxide and raw sienna and working down to the darks, raw umber, payne’s grey and ivory black. But this is the final touch, and my first answer to this question is that the form of the model, the structure of the building, really comes from a survey rather than a photo.