Piggot's General Store

Until sometime yesterday afternoon this post would have been titled "Smith's General Store" because that was the name I had put on the shop sign I created on my PC. But "Smith's..." just looked too tame for a general store in the middle of East Africa. So the search for a new name for the store began. It didn't take long to find the name...the name on a business card pinned to the back of the desk for a chap called Piggot just seemed perfect.

I wanted the store to be small, but feature a number of different textures. The basic shape was to be a stuccoed brick with a squared front and a corrugated iron gabled roof behind. To provide some of that texture, one side would feature an extension made of timber and corrugated iron.

Now I have made many model buildings over the years and whenever I start one I can pretty much always form an image of the completed item in my head. But it is not until I start painting of the model that it really comes to life.

I always start by painting the whole model matt black. I know that some people don't like the hashness of a black undercoat and prefer a dark brown base, but I like the depth of colour I can achieve with a black undercoat.

The first colour I apply is white, applied with a very rough dry-brush, as the render on the main structure.

This is followed by two more dry-brushed coats, finished with a fourth coat with a stippled brush.

Next was the timber work. It would have been easy to do this as bleached timber, but I wanted something a bit richer, so I started with a coat of GW Beastial Brown, then added a bit of yellow and finally dry-brushed a little white as a highlight.

Then I went back and blackened those parts where the white had been over brushed and then painted the window and door frames and the doors a mid blue, with a lighter blue highlight. 

The corrugated iron was painted a gun metal colour, and it is here that the depth provided by the black undercoat show up best.

The "Piggot's" sign had been printed on a laser printer earlier and was now glued on and weathered slightly with a a light brown and a bit of white.

Finally the building is weathered with some brown wash on the roof to simulate rust, some black wash as water stains and a light dust colour applied across much of the rest of the surface. And it is finished.

Also finished this week are two African native huts. These are the first of twelve I need to complete.