Sidewalks

Sidewalks are poured and carved plaster

I used coffee stir sticks as forms, held in place using a glue stick. After pouring the plaster and waiting a day for it to harden up I hand carved it with an X-acto knife. I won't say it was easy, but it's also hard to really mess up. The hardest part was keeping the expansion joints straight. After that I just carved a bunch of cracks. Any air bubbles in the surface of the plaster became missing chunks of concrete. I painted it with Woodland Scenics concrete pigment then followed that with India ink and acrylic washes. 

That's really about it.

Matt

Sign...

Hanging signs happen--but need to get fixed promptly.  It looks abandoned as it is--but if you put the owner outside, glaring up at it, or a few people with a ladder, then it looks like something that just happened.  The strand holding it up would need to be strait, too.

dito IrishRover's comment

Seedier neighborhood won't have the most expensive/quality signs I would think, so I thought of another thing too-  have your signs straight (because these are active businesses, right?) but add some very subtle rust streaks from where they hang/attach, to show that some of these signs have been there awhile and haven't been replaced in any recent memory.  Either on a sign itself or on the wall it's hanging on.  Thinking of not ancient, but 20+ year old signs, some have faded, so maybe a slight yellowing of the whites on a few signs?

...

I think it's a really good idea.  And no, it's not straight, because it's heavy iron holding a light sign.  So there...

Not every building in the seedy neighborhood need be "occupied"...

This store is occupied

Murph's is one of the major businesses on this street. And although Murph's is a pretty low end store Murph won't settle for having his sign fall on one of his daily lotto buyers. 

A model railroad scene is static, a snapshot in time. And yet it isn't because trains move through the scene. By putting figures in the scene actively doing something we are dooming those people to an eternity day and night of doing that activity. If I were to put a man on a ladder fixing the sign on a diorama that would be ok. For on a diorama we have a single snapshot of time. But as model railroaders we are challenged to make a scene believable day or night, Monday or Sunday. I can't doom Murph's sign man to an eternity of fixing a liquor store sign. I'll have to fix the sign myself.

Matt

options...

If you want something "in progress" without people around, then have a rope around the immediate area--or yellow tape, if it's modern--as a hint that people know about it, and will soon be fixing it.

Character

Sign...

I agree with Irish Rover. Perhaps this could be an excuse for a sign repair vignette. It would be huge liability for the owner and he'd want it fixed pronto, seedy neighborhood or not. The city would require it and would probably hand out a sizeable fine if it stayed that way for long.

I dig it!

Sometimes we fret over the simplest things. I think it's a very nice touch but, you're the one that has to live with it. Either way it will look great! You should be proud!

Thanks but the sign is gone now

Check out the rest of my blog. In the end I decided to lose the sign entirely. I just couldn't get the thread and later wire to hang right and decided to leave it and another hanging sign off. Someday in the future I'll revisit hanging signs and give it another go. But for now all the signs are mounted on the walls.

Thanks

Matt