Concept:
A late summer’s day in a small German town. Luigi’s ice cream parlour is at its
busiest. The takeaway sales is booming and all the chairs outside are occupied. In
an elegant convertible just in front of the guests a macho is waiting for his
girlfriend to bring him an ice cream cone. We wanted to place a lot of interesting
and funny details but still create a realistic scenery.
1. Basic plate
First
of all, we glued the pavement plate from the FALLER kit onto a piece of
hardboard with contact cement and weighted it down with heavy books overnight in
order to stick both parts together properly. Using grey and earth colour paints
we made the pavement look more realistic.
Finally,
we painted the street surface grey and ‘dirtied’ it a bit with earth colours.
Mud and tar patches reveal that there had recently been road works. We took some
photos of real drain covers and gutter stones, reduced them in size to H0 scale
with picture editing software and printed them. The floor of the ice cream
parlour was painted black after we had decided to build the house without an
interior furnishing.
2. Building
The
photos on the box promise a picturesque unobtrusive small house, so we were
pretty surprised to find rich turquoise parts inside the box! But no problem -
we decided to paint them in a traditional white, but we had to do that twice in
order to cover the bluish plastic properly. Doing so is no challenge as long as
the parts are still fixed to the sprue.
Unfortunately,
graffiti taggers have already disfigured one of the bright walls - modellists
use a very thin brush to imitate the tags. This is also good for suggesting
cracks and dirtiness of the plaster with extremely thinned dark paint.