Spiritus Pizza mini

It all started with an ice cream box.

I had been making mini brick walls for a few weeks and wanted to move onto a full building. I always loved Spiritus Pizza in Town, it exudes this cozy atmosphere especially at night. It was the brickwork in the front that really sealed it for me. So I started playing around with whatever I had at hand.

Here’s how I make my bricks!

Little, tiny brick molds. This is as small as I’ll go, and sometimes now I’ll just put a layer of clay over my surface and scar the bricks on. This one was 100% tiny molds.

This is honestly the exact opposite way of how I would build this now, but when you’re experimenting the rules go out the window. Here I built the building after the front patio area. Lighting tests!

Now for shingles, for that classic Cape Cod look.

I cut up actually pine shingles for this one and then weathered them with grey paint.

Got my basics down, so now to work out the accessories like benches and atm machines.

I started adding some moss powder to the front bricks here as well. I ended up making a new doorway piece to fit over the existing one so I could get the door lights in.

Here you can see that new doorway. Finding the lights lens to frame the doorway was very challenging.

I started weathering the wood more, darkening the bricks. I always do thin washes in case a tone is off, it’s easier to fix. For the moss on the roof, I use deer moss I have growing around my house and preserved dyed deer moss. I cut them up til its almost in a powder then sprinkle it on.

Here’s the Spiritus Pizza sign-it’s made mosaic style in real life, so I recreated the texture.

Here I added a light to the Spiritus sign using the top of an ho scale streetlight.

If I had planned out this build, I would have ran the wiring down thru the inside of the sign leg, but this was a “seat of your pants” build so I ran it across to the building.IN real life there is wiring there so happy accidents and all…

I got to the point I was really happy with the building, and the lighting, but it was still missing that tucked in, cozy feeling the real thing had. So I sculpted a tree in front that is there in real life. The base of the tree is hanging wire, which is great for making trees since it’s composed of several wires wound together. It makes creating branch offshoots easy. Over a few days I slowly glued on the leaves, taking time to let everything dry in between so I could properly build up the foliage.

The trickiest part was finding suitable lights to frame the doorway. In real life they’re more of a golden color, but after searching the internet for any kind of suitable dupe, I pulled the lenses off of a police car toy.

While making miniatures is really all about the details, sometimes you have to go for approximation.

And here it is, completed and in the wild.  You can see the fence pieces I added on the sides, which helped with stabilizing the tree.  I went back and filled any gaps with bits of moss to give a finished look.