Life mimicking Art

 Start of the Shopping Strip

I am now onto the third area of scenery to build which includes the King Street shopping strip of Newtown. There are many challenges in detailing this area compared to doing a country scene:  

1) I need to build alot of shops and buildings probably about a dozen so it will take sometime. 

2) They need to look different and genuine as if they are Australian Victorian shops rather than kits that have been built and place down that look "out of the box" and appear to look like it is a town from American or Europe.

3) I need to give each shop/building some unique individuality as well as giving it an Australian "look".

4) Signage and decals need to look periodic.

5) Some form of order and planning needs to be done as to where building are to be placed.

As a result of the above my first attempt at this was to build a cake shop representative of my spouse who loves baking. 

Above: Completed Leona's Home Made Cakes Shop painted and detailed with signage

Planning

I searched the Internet for a number of sources for photos of cake and pastry shops set in the mid twentieth in Australia. This was used to get ideas of the style of the shop frontage as well as font types. The main difficulty is that a majority of photos were in black and white so I had to look further by a decade to find colour photos.

The Build

The Cake Shop will be positioned at the back of the layout at an angle and will be a low relief building.  I had a number of kits I previous purchased and only used parts of it. One was DPM Sams Hardware which I used the first storey of the shop for my Allandale Saw Building. I still had the rear and sides of the building as well as the ground floor, front shop section that I had not used. 

I am now learning to reuse more and more of my model bits and pieces rather than discarding them or leave them lying around for a "future project".

For the first storey of the building, I wanted to make it look different and had a partly used "Models and More" Bradbury building with the arched windows. This distinctive feature I thought would look Victorian in style and would be great to add to the front of the building.

Above: The "Frankenstein" of modelling some kit bashing taking shape bonding two different kit types together a plastic kit and a wood laser cut kit.

Other Detailed features

One distinctive feature of Australia shops is the presence of the awning which are held together by cables attached to building to ward off the Australian sun. American and European shops are absent of this feature and I wanted it to be present in my model.  I also added a top feature for the building as a distinctive addition to Victorian era shops.

Signage and Decals

An important feature in dating a building is the signage. After doing my research I chose colours and fonts that represented the era I was modelling. I used my trusty laptop and Publisher software to print this out on photo quality paper to ensure that the signage would stand up to some beating. This will be used for the awning signage as well as building signage something that is no longer common these days. I also photo-shopped some photos for use as window displays and interiors that looked appropriate for the period.

Above:  A copy of one of the artworks I did using Publisher using photo size template

Besides printing out artwork on photo paper, I also made my own decals for the building signs to be respresent the painted advertisements that use to adore side building in its day. I used my Inkjet printer and decal paper spraying on matt spray after the print to bond the decal down.

Above: Side view of the Cake Shop showing Decals applied.