1/56 Leslie Hotel (art deco) for 1930s pulp - WIP - new photos Mar 8/10

[Burgundavia]

Inspired by a friend's blog post of the hotel he is staying at in Miami, I have started building a 1/56 model of that hotel for our the .45A pulp games.



Thankfully for those of us who aren't all that talented, Art Deco has a lot of straight lines and gentle curves. The Hotel Leslie is no exception. However, given Art Deco is all about the inter-relationship between those lines, I needed to graph out my slightly modified hotel at 1 scale inch =  1/2 drawn inch (1/112 scale).



Tonight I got down to work and cut out the front facade:


Tomorrow I need to go shopping for the various styrene bits for the facade and cut out the sides and floors.

[HerbyF]

Looks a lot like the Alki Beach condos they have been building down here in Seattle over the past 20 years.

[Silent Invader]

I shall be following with great interest. 

[Burgundavia]

Will it have a full interior, or is it more of a backdrop?

I am hoping (depserately) you will go for the former, not the latter. I'd love to see the cool elegance of art deco interior design doen in miniature.

Initially I was planning an art deco facade based on the Queen's Printer building here in Victoria ( ) but when I saw that hotel, I knew that I had to do a full interior.

[Operator5]

I can't wait to see how this turns out. I've wanted to do deco buildings for a long time and could just never get to them.

[odd duck]

Art Deco buildings have been on my to do list for ages but allways get pushed to the rear of the line.Glad to see someone doing one,and with an interior yet!!I'm looking forward to waching this project!

[fastolfrus]

... and an Odeon Cinema next ?

[fastolfrus]

Or "Gone With the Wind" ...

You can get some lovely 1930s cinema posters from one of the craft paper/scrapbook paper suppliers. I picked up a couple of A4 sheets last year, one was mostly "Tom Mix" westerns, but there were also travel posters etc.
Some of the posters were about the size of a credit card, others about double that size, but on an A4 sheet you get a lot of images....

[Smokeyrone]

LOL!   I've been there. 

yes, lets hope he does the interiror.  Great stuff inside  (actually, as I despise art deco, its not great stuff, but it would be in miniature for pulp!    )

You know, if you are doing a Pulp in Miami scenario, you also need the "Fountain Blue" (As seen on "Goldfinger", where James's gal gets gold plated after he foils Goldfinger's card cheating enterprise), "Joes Stone Crabs" (THE Restaurant in Miami) AND of course, the old, GREAT Orange Bowl.

And if ever in Miami, eat at Joes Stone Crabs!  They have stone crabs!

 

And of course Al Capone's art deco mansion/estate, now owned by his son, who donated a lot of money to the Canes football program, I'm happy to say. 
 

[Burgundavia]

Finally got to work on this again. I now have all the facades cut out. I will do the floor cuts for the stairs tomorrow and then I can start assembling. Pictures from my flickr set:

[Burgundavia]

Been working on some of the interior details and as part of that I started worked on a room frieze:


Feel free to use it if you want.

[ushistoryprof]

Looking forward to seeing it when your finished.

[Burgundavia]

Did a bunch more work today with the front facade. It is missing the decoration under the 2nd floor windows, the half-round between the outer sets of narrow windows, and the veranda eyebrow/roof.



The rest of the pictures can be seen on my flickr set.

[Burgundavia]

Finished gluing together the main and two upper stories, save for gluing on the front facade, which is easier to work on completely flat. New pics:






Construction is foamcore with the details a mixture of styrene and wood. Interior will be printed with furniture built out of wood and milliput.

For those of you going to Trumpeter Salute in Vancouver, BC next weekend (the 12-14th of March), I may bring it along just for show and tell, depending on travel space.

[Steve F]

That's coming along really nicely.  More photos as you finish it off would be very welcome.