Gulf Station (Part 2)

 That gas station that I've been chipping away at is looking like maybe it has seen better days.

With an assortment of gas station signs included in the kit package, I chose to try to make this a Gulf station. I masked off appropriate areas of the building, and then sprayed an orange craft paint that at least approximated the colour that Gulf uses.  But then I decided to not use any of the signs, as this station has been closed up for some time.

To begin that aging process, I removed bits of the orange with just a tiny bit of alcohol dabbed on a Q-Tip, trying to allow some of the original white to show through.

For the roof, I cut a piece of thin cardboard to size, and then using 3M 77 as adhesive, laid a single ply of tissue over the cardboard to try to give the roof a bit of texture.  Masking parts of the roof off with a business card as I went, I sprayed a couple of different grey shades to represent rolled roofing lines.

This next photo should give a hint as to what's going on with this little structure.  A few years ago, George Dutka had given me a set of paper images of aged plywood, knowing that at some point I'd use it to blank out windows on a building.

I'm not too crazy about the colour of the "plywood" piece that I've used to board up the large window on the right.  It's more blue-grey than I think I'd like, so I think that I'll probably replace it with one that's a somewhat cleaner plywood colour.  That's flat black that I've sprayed above the garage bay doors. It's the best I had that would approximate the look of soot from the inferno that may have been the reason for the business to close. Or maybe the fire occurred after the closure. Who knows, right?

I've cut a .040 styrene base to mount the building on, and painted it a concrete colour.  I drew a scale 12'x 12' grid onto the painted styrene with a very fine point black ink artist's pen to represent the expansion cuts and cracks in the concrete. The pen I used is a true black, not the blue-black that is used in Sharpie pens.

So here, you can really begin to see where I'm trying to go with this.  The gas pumps are long gone, but the concrete island remains, the Gulf sign and pole that would have been to the front left of the lot is also gone, but the concrete pad it would have been mounted on remains. The light standard on the island is leaning to one side, as though maybe a vehicle hit it at some point in time.  The lower area of the building has been given the once (or twice) over with grimy black.  

And so back to that roof.  Well, the roof has been burned through in a fire. Yes, literally.  I took just the roof outside (remember it is cardboard), and lit it on fire for a few seconds, doing my best to burn only an area that I had pre-determined.  I like to think that I'm just smart enough to not try that in the house.

Here are a couple of photos highlighting the roof.

I had couple of pieces of I-beam that I ran from the back wall to the front as roof supports.  I chose in the end to only have one of the beams showing through the burned out hole in the roof.  The roof vents on the left are above the office and washrooms. 

A view from the right-hand end

A little bit of sand as pieces of gravel thrown  randomly around the concrete, weeds growing up through the cracks, and some oil stains where the vehicles used to stop at the gas pumps.

That's where this gas station stands for now.  Hopefully I'll be able to get this actually onto the layout in the coming few days.