Notes on renovating the American Gothic house
On 4 March, I wrote a post I titled Help Me Grant Wood and in it I detailed a presentation I was working on that had to do with an imaginary renovation of the house that sits in the background of Grant Wood's American Gothic.
What started out as an interesting idea has grow to be my life's paintings over the last 5 weeks. I actually have by no means used SketchUp at this degree before and I've in no way researched some thing so exhaustively in my life.
Right after I learned that it was a real house in Eldon, Iowa (that's currently rented to a caretaker by the way), I started digging around for anything I could find out about it. I found an entire library of photographs. That was relatively easy.
I hit on the mother lode when I found the Wapello County Assessor's website. On it, I found the property records for the house. I was hoping to find the plat for the property, but I found something equally useful in its place. Ta-da!
It's the measured footprint of the American Gothic House.
I saved it as a .Jpg and imported into a SketchUp document after which I scaled it as much as the right length. So now that I knew how massive the indoors partitions had been, I could discern out the heights of the whole lot from looking over the library of pics I'd accrued.
Here's the very last exterior view I drew.
When I became digging around for pics, I got here throughout this one.
It's the only image I could find of the back of the house. Who knew that there was another Gothic window and a back porch on the American Gothic house?
Speaking of that window, it took me the better part of a Saturday to get the radii right on that Gothic arch.
So there are the exterior shots. Ultimately, that version's going to grow to be Google Earth and that's pretty cool. I by no means idea I'd have a version on Google Earth a few day. It's an exciting thing to contemplate.
I completed the interior the day gone by and I suppose I did the residence proud. I'm no longer showing the interiors right here simply but, though I will in the end. If you actually need to look them even though, you'll should come to Chicago next Thursday.