The model is two-colored because I assumed that the plastic filament colors in my starter kit would be easy to replace. I was mistaken: there was no gold 3Doodler filament to be found, so I switched to, appropriately, Basilica White.
Beginning with the exciting part, I first built the front and towers. Condensing the real building’s details to small scale left me with the basic repeating forms of door window frames.
The chevet or choir is the rear of the cathedral.
While the cathedral in France lacks spires atop its front towers, I found an artist’s rendition of how the building with spires atop all its towers, not merely the front facade. Medieval architects often planned spires for their cathedrals, but usually structural or budgetary constraints interfered. I may have run out of gold plastic, but I finished the spires as planned.
This image inspired me to undertake the imposing spires that are not present on the existing building.
While Gothic Cathedrals may seem too intricate to recreate in miniature, many of their forms are repeated, so a single stencil goes a long way. At the time Reims was built, French architects had been building Gothic cathedrals for a century. Reims manifests their growing savvy for building soaring structures on increasingly slender piers and flying buttresses.
For symmetrical surfaces, I opted to draw half and mirror it in Photoshop, especially for details like the rose window. This model is not mathematically scaled from the real building, but with graph paper I estimated sizes and relationships.
The model is two-colored because I assumed that the plastic filament colors in my starter kit would be easy to replace. I was mistaken: there was no gold 3Doodler filament to be found, so I switched to, appropriately, Basilica White.
Beginning with the exciting part, I first built the front and towers. Condensing the real building’s details to small scale left me with the basic repeating forms of door window frames.
The chevet or choir is the rear of the cathedral.
While the cathedral in France lacks spires atop its front towers, I found an artist’s rendition of how the building with spires atop all its towers, not merely the front facade. Medieval architects often planned spires for their cathedrals, but usually structural or budgetary constraints interfered. I may have run out of gold plastic, but I finished the spires as planned.
This image inspired me to undertake the imposing spires that are not present on the existing building.
While Gothic Cathedrals may seem too intricate to recreate in miniature, many of their forms are repeated, so a single stencil goes a long way. At the time Reims was built, French architects had been building Gothic cathedrals for a century. Reims manifests their growing savvy for building soaring structures on increasingly slender piers and flying buttresses.
For symmetrical surfaces, I opted to draw half and mirror it in Photoshop, especially for details like the rose window. This model is not mathematically scaled from the real building, but with graph paper I estimated sizes and relationships.