Tiny Buildings

Sharon Mount creates tiny buildings from business cards and other interesting papers. She collects paper from places she has visited and turns them into tiny works of art. What a great way to save a memory! Originally she and her family used them as Christmas decorations, but since then the collection has grown. It was almost impossible to choose just one to share. There are many more at her blog, and even more on flickr. Definitely worth spending some time looking at. I really appreciate her skill and attention to detail. Working at such a tiny scale can often be more difficult than working on larger projects.

Seeing Sharon's work takes me back to my college days where I spent hours with an exacto blade and cardboard creating models. Modeling is a great way to study proportion and shape. It is also a fun way to include your children in the design process of their playhouse. In school we did two types of physical models, presentation models and sketch models. The sketch models were fun and loose. Some were even be made out of scraps or trash (those were some of my favorites). Much more skill and patience is required for presentation models. If you are planning on trying this with young children, I would recommend going with the sketch model and working at a slightly larger scale...think shoe box instead of match box. You can always work on a mini masterpiece of your own. Oh, keep the exacto away from the kids!

These buildings have a distinct graphic quality that would be fun to experiment with on a much larger life size scale. Hum...another idea to explore.