1:35 Propagační tabule a plakáty

An advertising sign turns scenery into an inhabited place

A wartime scene is not made of rubble alone. Most of the fighting took place in places that had lived normally until then: by a general store, by a fuel pump, by a pub, by the village notice board. An enameled sign with an advertisement or a pasted-up poster are exactly the small things that tell a viewer the front passed through a settled place, rather than that a machine ended up in empty scenery.

What the sheet offers

The sheet is color-printed fine paper measuring 19 by 11 centimeters. The individual motifs are cut out of it and glued on separately. A paper sign can be stuck onto a thin plastic plate or onto a piece of metal, which gives a firm board with a thickness of its own that can be screwed to a facade or fixed to a post by a road.

Placing it in the scene

Notice boards belong at eye height, that is about five millimeters above the level of the sidewalk at this scale. Higher placement looks unnatural and it is a common mistake. An advertising sign above an entrance, by contrast, takes more, because it was meant to be legible from the street. If you bend or tilt the board slightly, it stops looking like a glued-on rectangle.

The condition and age of the individual elements

An enameled sign lasted for decades, so it can be in good condition even in the middle of a ruined street, only chipped at the edges. A paper poster beside it will be faded and torn instead. A difference in the age of two neighboring elements is the detail that gives a scene credibility. It is worth settling in advance the year in which the scene takes place and choosing accordingly what will already be faded and what still fresh. A viewer will not name that difference, but will notice it.