One convenience store down....

... and one to go.

The front steps are built up from pieces of 0.060 inch styrene sheet. Also, I added long strips of 0.010 inch styrene underneath the white brick strips to build out the front facade a little. These things were painted with a loose wash of gray, white, concrete, and a little black paint.

I didn't do any detailing on the back. Just added some doors. I might add some details later once I've decided on a place on the layout for it.

The roof is a piece of stucco textured styrene sheet painted with loose washes - mainly black. I just wanted something that suggested a roof, not anything highly detailed.

The roof isn't glued in place. It sits on a perimeter ledge and can be easily lifted out. I'm going to add some lights and photos to simulate interior detail. On this project I concentrated on the facade to try and learn more about making a '50s or '60s store front.

Convenience store update

Although we’re having an unusually fall-like summer due to a so-called ‘polar-vortex’ reaching down from the arctic,  when the real fall gets here I plan to get back to my layout to install a lot of lights and make a number of other changes. One is to add these convenience stores.

[The Walther's kit that is going to be turned into a Mac's Milk store. At this point the window and door unit has been successfully installed.]

I had separate threads for these two buildings, but given their similarity I thought I’d combine them.

[The main door on Le Tablier Rouge is inset from the facade. It's built from sheet styrene.]

I’ve added a street sign to the Tablier Rouge. It’s rather simple and is just a printout of a photo that’s been installed in a rectangular frame made from painted styrene shapes. There’s a piece of clear plastic over top of the printout to give it a glossy finish. It’s not lit. I’d like to add some photos of an actual store interior to the Rouge’s and light it. As well, there’s still a bit of work that needs to be done on the façade to add steps and unify the finishes.

[That little peg in the lower left corner - and his brother on the other side - were mismatched with the holes on the window and door unit preventing it from being installed.]

The Walther’s store kit is dead simple, but there was one annoying quirk I stumbled across while trying to install the façade’s window unit. The pegs molded into the front brick part of the façade don’t line up with the corresponding mounting holes in the window piece. Once the pegs were ground off, the window unit fit just fine, and the corresponding clear plastic overlay installed ok too.

[Here is the window and door unit installed after the the pegs were ground off.]

Building out Ocean Blvd.

I want to fill out Ocean Boulevard with a few more buildings and details to give it a denser and livelier feel. I bought this Walther’s modern convenience store kit as I thought it would be an easy build and fit in with the modern street scene along the boulevard. I don’t plan to modify the kit other than to replace the generic sign with something more reminiscent of Toronto in the ‘70s.

The kit is very simple: just a plastic box with an interesting glass and steel-framed front typical of these types of stores. It glues up easily, and when the wind dies down I’ll take it outside for painting.