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Fenestration!!!

To aid my fenestration, the word for today, I made  nifty little template this morning.  Time for a new and extremely sharp hobby knife blade.

Relax!  It's nothing obscene, immoral, or lascivious.  'Fenestration' is just a fancy word architects use in relation to the placement of windows and doors.  I must admit the need to look up the word in my trusty dictionary when I heard it for the first time in an architect's video on YouTube.  

The meaning should have occurred to me given the similarity of the word to the German and Swedish words for 'window' (Fenster and fönster respectively. . .  presumably the word is derived from the Latin.), but there you go. Funny how the ancient Romans remain with us in so many ways in 2017.  "I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus, this, that, and the other. . ."

 Anyway, I started applying the half-timbered effects to a few of my smaller building models yesterday, and that went reasonably well although the activity was time consuming.  I also used a small plastic stencil full of rectangles, squares, circles, and other shapes to begin tracing in the windows and doors on the structures comprising my Baltic German town center.  Again, a time consuming process and, shall we say, a bit imperfect.  "Surely, there has to be a better way," thought I.

 So, this morning, after that first mug of coffee, as well as my daily feline lovefest following their daily treat of a small can of Fancy Feast, I set out to solve the problem at hand.  Above, you'll observe the fruits of my 30 minutes or so of labor, a custom made stencil that enables me to quickly and easily trace in consistently sized doors and windows on model building walls.  No fingertips were severed during the process. 

And it worked like a charm!  Once the stencil was finished, I was able to outline the windows and doors on nine of the dozen new town buildings in about 20 minutes.  All I have to do now is carefully paint in some translucent  brown, to suggest the, ahem, fenestration, and Bob's your mother's brother.  Stay tuned!

 -- Stokes

Comments

WSTKS-FM Worldwide said…
Gulp! I hope a pair of concrete shoes are not in my immediate future. Fuggeddaboutit!

Best Regards,

Stokes
4:37 PM
Fitz-Badger said…
Yeah, the first thing that came to my mind was the in/famous "Defenestration of Prgaue". An actual historical event that had nothing to do with home remodeling or the removal of windows.

The template is a great idea for drawing windows and doors on such an impressive collection of buildings!

(now I'm wondering if there is an equivalent term where doors are concerned...)
6:19 PM
Big Andy said…
Having been defenestrated twice in my lifetime- once without the window being open. I can say with some authority that it is not pleasant- though since I was somewhat under the influence on one of those occasions I don't remember the journey only the arrival in the flower bed.
It may be a bit late but a thought occours- etched brass windows- saves an awful lot of cutting out .An outfit called scale link used to to them on model railway scales so I'm sure there will be US alternatives. I found them awfully useful
3:15 AM
Ross Mac rmacfa@gmail.com said…
Must be something in the coffee, that makes 3 of us.

However that does look like a handy little jig for fenestrating.

( Presumably a sharp knife would have to be applied before defenestrating any delegates.)
6:57 AM
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