The Prehistory Part I

I took a gap-year of sorts when I finished studying Industrial Design before continuing on to do an MSc in Computing and Design. Model-making was a skill that I picked up from my degree and I subsequently spend a year in a workshop at the foot of the Dublin Mountains.

This all would have been circa the year 2000, and 3D modeling was just gaining popularity. Plenty of places still wanted the real deal, like tourist centres and museums.

This is a model of An Earagail in County Donegal. The process for building this was pretty straightforward. We were handed a map and that was it. Then it was: cut out the base, mould the topography from fibreglass, hand paint the mountains, flock the grass and varnish the ocean. My lasting memory of this is slicing the top of my finger off and blood gushing through those miniature valleys.

An Earagail aprox. 1.5m x 2.5m

Building this one of Dublin Castle was a bit of a pain. You can see from the second photo that it was built on a slanted base and had a forced perspective towards the right. It was a bit of an odd one. Periodically my boss would wander by and rip off whole walls and battlements declaring that they were all wrong.

Dublin Castle 0.75m x 1.5m

There was a photo shoot after every model was finished and “the sky”  was hauled in from storage and propped up in the background. You can see a bit of the workshop peeping through in the image below. I worked on some of the detailing in the Dublin Quays project. This involved painting clothes on tiny 10mm people that you see walking around. Not a bad way to pass an afternoon: painting outfits with a 000 brush. It’s kind of weird 18 months later walking past life-size versions of what you made.

Dublin Quay

This model of Westport was nearing completion when I started at the workshop. I made houses, flocked the grass and stuck in tress. It turned out to be quite useful having a birds-eye-view of the town in my mind’s eye. A good friend of mine from university moved there and I visited her a lot. I was able to navigate around the place when we fell out of a pub. It was like having a mental Google map long before they existed.

Westport Co. Mayo 2m x 2m

Overall this was a great job. I loved the hands-on nature of it and the tangible results. I interviewed for another job and almost ended up working in another workshop that specialized in making new limbs for amputees. It was at this point in time that I decided to go back to university and study Computing and Design. Now all my time is spent creating for the screen, the opposite end of the spectrum really.

an earagail, dublin castle, dublin quay, modelmaking, westport, workshop