1:72 French Street

A street as a ready-made stage

A street section settles the most laborious work for the modeler: the paving, the curbs and the way the houses meet the roadway. And a French small town with a narrow roadway and houses built right on the edge of the sidewalk is a setting that turns up in the vast majority of scenes from the campaign of 1940 and from the fighting after the landings. On this part you can build a column, an armored car driving through, or simply a civilian scene with residents watching what is going on.

Its place in the brand's range

Behind the range stands Acrylicos Vallejo of Barcelona, which alongside its paints also runs the Scenics building program. That program numbers a hundred and six items and only four of them are in the smaller size; of those, the street section covers the largest area. The remaining three pieces of the four represent an industrial hall from two sides and the corner of a residential house, so together they make up a coherent set of buildings for one town.

How to finish the scene off

Nothing adds more credibility than work on the surface of the roadway. Cobblestones are painted in irregular groups, not uniformly, and the joints are drawn out with a dark glaze whose excess is then wiped away. Fine dust and a hint of grass belong in the gaps by the curb, while a polished track from wheels belongs along the middle of the roadway. Once a few small things are added, such as a bicycle leaning against the wall or a pile of rubble, the street stops looking like a model and starts looking like a place. It is exactly these small things that decide more than the number of figures, because a viewer notices the connections, not the individual pieces.