All models have a purpose and this one served to honor a son’s gratitude and love for his father. The source of inspiration was the actual building of their family business, established in 1955.  To avoid having the appearance of a toy, the materials used on this piece of Model Art™ had to be true scale replicas in every way.  We used electroluminescent paper (paper that lights up!) and bent tiny rods to simulate the actual appearance of the neon sign.  The wooden texture of the facade and the weave of the fabric are just the right scale to give the viewer a true sense of being there.  We focused our attention on the colorful and bold character of the outside and added a personal touch on the inside: a photograph of Antonio’s father in front of the brick oven, where he always is, making the pizza.

Forrest came across our website and had a vision for the cover of his self-titled album.  We welcome creative collaborations with all types of artists, so realizing this musician’s vision made the project and subsequent photo shoot fun, fast, and quite affordable.  It helps that we save every sample and create pieces for rent, as well.  We were able to quickly put together something that worked.

This piece of Model Art™ was presented as a gift to the owner of 55 Stockton from his employees.  Our intention was produce a piece that was symbolic of his success and would be cherished and valued as fine art for generations.

This building is located just outside of Union Square in San Francisco.  Currently, it is the flagship store for Crate & Barrel and home of the FIDM (Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising.)  Heller Manus won an award for the most innovative use of precast in the 1980s.  Their use of this material created a lot of movement in the facade, thus lending itself to a layered approach in the construction of the scale model and making it a perfect subject for Model Art™.

This interesting textural model was made from exotic woods and gold-plated brass.  The golden roofs, window mullions, and signage were made of 50 separate etched-brass parts, soldered, and plated with 24-karat gold.  The glass was represented with Katalox.  The woods were individually selected in order to show the proper color differences between them.  The texture of the grain at this scale was also of great importance in producing the model.  We used quartersawn Hard Maple for the outer precast layer and Pink Ivory for the inner precast panels.  The model artist chose Bolivian Rosewood for the frame and Brown Mallee Burl for the roads and flat roof, purely for decorative interest.  We were fortunate to be able to include a piece of American history: Spalted Sugar Maple for the sidewalks and decks.  This particular piece of wood came from a tree planted in the early 19th century at the estate of Andrew Jackson.  It was among hundreds blown down by a tornado near Nashville in the 1990s.

The architects for the interior of the W Hotel San Francisco, STANLEY SAITOWITZ │ NATOMA ARCHITECTS INC, designed the modern lobby with a San Francisco theme. They used patterned perforated ceiling panels to represent the fog of The City, made the space dark as night and needed a sculptural piece to represent San Francisco at night. Using photographs as our inspiration, we sculpted this piece of Model Art with both precision and artistic license. The topography was machined with a 2.5x vertical exaggeration to emphasize the changes in grade. We installed 2,000 LEDs in 4 colors on 4 circuits so that we could set the intensity of each circuit in place. A little fun was added by using red LEDs to represent points of interest in San Francisco and a single purple LED to designate the W Hotel.

As our world becomes more and more virtual, the demand to bring things back to physical form increases. This is an exciting revelation for professional model makers. Who doesn’t use Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop in the design world? Yet, how often do we stop and appreciate the work as works of art? The Adobe Museum very cleverly and appropriately creates a virtual art gallery to showcase and celebrate the work created with Adobe products with a simulated physical experience. Our Model Art piece, the Adobe Museum Sculpture, brought the concept all the way out into physical form and is displayed as Model Art at Adobe headquarters. Because this building was never intended to exist in physical form, there were several heart-pounding milestones in the production of this piece. Note the towers, not growing straight up from the base, but cantilevering from the side. Note the intertwining twists and turns in the podium gallery spaces and the hundreds of pedals to be modeled. The challenge was not just reconstructing the idea into a usable 3D CAD format, but designing the piece so that it could be physically assembled and finished without falling apart, (as the laws of physics must now be considered) – with lighting, too. There were a few skeptics who doubted it could be done successfully, but we persisted through each technical barrier and the end product speaks for itself.

As our world becomes more and more virtual, the demand to bring things back to physical form increases. This is an exciting revelation for professional model makers. Who doesn’t use Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop in the design world? Yet, how often do we stop and appreciate the work as works of art? The Adobe Museum very cleverly and appropriately creates a virtual art gallery to showcase and celebrate the work created with Adobe products with a simulated physical experience. Our Model Art piece, the Adobe Museum Sculpture, brought the concept all the way out into physical form and is displayed as Model Art at Adobe headquarters. Because this building was never intended to exist in physical form, there were several heart-pounding milestones in the production of this piece. Note the towers, not growing straight up from the base, but cantilevering from the side. Note the intertwining twists and turns in the podium gallery spaces and the hundreds of pedals to be modeled. The challenge was not just reconstructing the idea into a usable 3D CAD format, but designing the piece so that it could be physically assembled and finished without falling apart, (as the laws of physics must now be considered) – with lighting, too. There were a few skeptics who doubted it could be done successfully, but we persisted through each technical barrier and the end product speaks for itself.