Chodník čtverce (3,2 x 3,2 mm)

A sidewalk the eye can walk along

A sidewalk is one of those elements that tell a viewer whether anyone thought the scene through. It leads the eye from the edge of the base to a figure, separates the roadway from a building and, with its regular grid of joints, gives the whole scene its scale. That is exactly why it pays to use a ready molded pattern rather than scribing the joints by hand: the eye spots at once when they are not the same distance apart.

The side of a square is 3.2 millimeters according to the name. In the smaller scales, including railroad 1:87, this gives a slab of roughly thirty centimeters, which matches an ordinary concrete slab on a real sidewalk. In the larger scales the same pattern serves as small interlocking paving or as cladding for the area under a vehicle.

The sheet can be cut, sanded and glued just like any other styrene. A sidewalk tends to look more convincing when it is not left perfectly level: a slab lifted slightly at the root of a tree, a crack cut with a knife across two squares or a broken corner at the curb tell a story of their own.

At the end a gray base, slight differences in the shade of the individual slabs and a dark wash in the joints all help. A little dry pigment along the edge suggests dust carried up from the roadway.

The curb is finished from a rectangular profile glued along the edge. If a hairline gap is left between it and the surface and filled with filler, you get exactly the slightly uneven transition that a real structure has after a few years of use. The joint then does not look like two pieces stuck together.