No Scalescenes don't do Christmas cards but with the festive season upon me I decided to turn two of their kits into cards with a difference. It was also nice to be able to build a couple of the Scalescenes kits that normally wouldn't have a need for on my layout.
The first Christmas card utilised the Low Relief Cinema kit T006. I regularly go to the cinema with a friend of mine and thought this would be an ideal theme, as long as I could make it look Christmasy enough.
As usual it was a great kit to build and the options are excellent. It's almost two kits in one as you can build it as a cinema or shop, with a brick or block faced building. The centre aperture in the upper section becomes the stairwell and lifts for the shop and it comes with a variety of popular high street names for the entrance. The cinema also comes with several period names and styles, from pre-war to modern day. There is also a selection of film posters to suit the various decades since the war. The clever bit is that while the Scalescene's Pdf's are protected from editing, the designer John Whiffen has enabled a clever little facility to allow the reader to add their own text above the entrance. While this is meant to be for the film of choice it was an ideal opportunity to add a Christmas greeting.
As usual the kit went together very well and the instructions were very clear. The only glitch I had was the opening in the stone block frontage that goes around the entrance. Although I made it to the correct size, once wrapped around the building there was a large gap between the walls and the doors. After some head scratching and double checking it became apparent that it was the material I was using and not the kit that was at fault. Scalescenes recommend 2mm greyboard and the link to a supplier listed theirs as 2300 microns, which I presume is 2.3mm. I was using regular mount board from the art shop which was only around 1.7mm. It was the slimness of this mount board of up to half a millimetre that was causing the problem. However, all was not lost as I simply printed the required pages again and created a new building front with a slightly narrower aperture for the doors. It's worth noting that the wall coverings in these kits wrap around the edges of the windows and doors, so the fact that I made the opening a little smaller didn't mean I had bare card exposed down each side.
As a personal touch I didn't use the film posters supplied with the kit but went to Flixter and downloaded the film posters of what we had seen over the last year. I then scaled these to size in Word, printed them off and cut them out. Colouring the edges of course as all the borders were black.
Next came the snow. I wanted the snow to have volume, look realistic but to also have that Christmas sparkle. Fortunately my mother is an avid card maker and gave me three different samples of snow and sparkle effects. One was like very fine scenic scatter, one tiny sparkly snow and one more like a glitter. I sampled them all and none of them gave the effect I was looking for. The answer was to mix all three together, so it had volume, whiteness and sparkle. I avidly applied PVA to all the top surfaces and edges and carefully added the scatter before turning in for the night. I though it look great, however I didn't know it at the time but I had made a newbie mistake. The snow was applied to the white PVA which acted like a primer base but by the morning the PVA had dried and was now translucence, so the nice white snow on the pavement was now a dirty grey! It was very disappointing and I prevaricated for some time as to what course of action to take. It was too horrible to leave as it was and too delicate scrape off, so I decided to paint all the snow white and then re-flock everything. To my surprise this turned out for the best, the snow was now very white and the second layer gave it added volume.
The final touches were to add two people, a bus stop and a greeting on the back in the form of two Christmas themed cinema tickets. Interestingly these are original Airfix figures and not the Dapol figures. Although they are fundamentally the same their size and the detail is slightly different. The Dapol figures still have detail, so I don't think it's the original mould that has just started to wear, it is more like the originals have been copied and new tooling used.
What was the other card? It was the garage, again covered in snow but this time with icicles and Santa's sleigh broken down outside. I hope to cover this in my next article, so watch this space.
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