Here’s the Linka Dublo corner store, painted and varnished. It was painted with a mixture of old Games Workshop paints, and Vallejo game colours. The bricks were dry brushed with GW’s Graveyard Earth (which is apparently no longer produced?) and then several were picked out on each wall in a variety of colours, just to break up the monotony. You can’t see it in this photo, but I’ve done the same with the roofing slate, painting some areas darker or lighter to try and suggest repairs or weathering.
The window glass is just cut from a sheet of laminating plastic, and the curtains are just small pieces of A4 paper glued to the inside of each window. You can see into the interior space if you try hard enough, so the middle floor has a bit of foam board separating the front and back windows to stop you looking straight through. It works quite nicely to suggest there might be an interior space to the building.
For the larger shop front windows I had to resort to wedging the ‘glass’ in using matchsticks at the corners, one of which you can see on the right side of the smaller window. The items on display are glued onto a couple of pieces of foamboard cut at an angle to match the recessed doorway.
I’ve applied a bunch of suitable 1930’s signage from the Model Railway Scenery website. A mix of posters have been applied to both sides of the building so it can be stacked at either end against the row of terraced houses I built earlier. The shop front signage was just whipped up in Inkscape using some free ‘Western’ fonts from dafont.com.
The final building is only loosely based on the famous ‘Open All Hours’ store. The building used in the show actually had a bay window above the main shop front. The shop front itself also had more woodwork over the door and display windows. Modelling at this scale provided some constraints which meant I didn’t got for an exact match, but rather something that would be easy to build and at least appear similar to Arkright’s store.