1:35 French House Corner

The corner that holds the whole scene together

A corner house is the key piece in a city diorama. It decides where the street runs, where the shadow falls and from where the viewer looks at the scene. The subject is French town architecture of the kind modelers associate with the campaigns of 1940 and with Normandy four years later: render peeled away down to the stone masonry, window reveals, wooden shutters and a ground-floor opening for a shop or a passageway. The piece is laid out so that it can stand on its own at the edge of a base.

The number series and its logic

The manufacturer's part number places the house in the middle group of the brand's diorama range, the one with twenty items. While the lowest group gathers small sections, this one holds large building sections and extensive bases, among them paved streets, an intersection with rails, a factory frontage and a cafe. The brand comes from Barcelona, where it is known as Acrylicos Vallejo mainly thanks to its acrylic paints, but it runs its diorama goods as a separate line under the name Scenics.

Recommended procedure

The cast part is first freed of mold release agent in a soap bath and left to dry overnight. It pays to stand it on a board dry and check that it seats along its whole length. Painting starts from the darkest tone in the joints; only then come the layers of render and finally the weathered streaks under the sills, where water runs down. The shutters are painted separately so that they differ from the wall both in tone and in sheen. The last layer is usually the fine dust settled on the horizontal cornices and on the sills, which optically sets the whole corner into the street.