Wall Decals

It was looking like the only way I was going to get crisp, clear lettering on an intensely red background for the WSMoftheWBB was to buy a new higher-end printer that sported a place for a pure red ink cartridge. I didn’t want to spend any more money on this project, so I decided I’d go with what I had and try to blend the wall decaling in with paint. 

The end result was a somewhat run-down look at street level. Toronto being a rather gritty city, this wasn’t too far out of place in the overall scheme of things even though it wasn’t prototypically accurate for this building. I once had a painting teacher who said that a painting has to hold together on its own because the typical viewer has never seen the actual object that you’re painting, so if you need to do something that deviates from the object to make the painting work, that’s fine. I think the same applies to model building. 

I’ve got decaling on my mind these days and since I was at it I decided to try another idea I’d been toying with: the addition of a simple mural to the back wall of Stella’s Used Records. I bought a boxed set of Bill Evan’s Village Vanguard recordings last winter in a remainder bin and I thought the cover image would be a great piece of HO graffiti – well, I’d be impressed if I walked down a street and saw it sprayed on a building :-)

I scanned the image, scaled it to fit the wall, and printed it on a piece of Micro Mark clear decal sheet. The image was fixed with a few sprays of Tester’s Dullcote. The decal was set on the wall with several applications of Micro Sol decal setting solution.