DIORAMA DETAILS: New Signage Enhances Realism at the Track

Sometimes spending a Saturday in the office isn’t all bad…especially when the company you work for owns a $35,000 Xerox 4-color dry toner printer that you can use, sparingly, for a few personal prints when you want. Forced to do some “catch up” at the office on a recent weekend, I made it worth my while when, once I was finished, I used some measurements I had taken the previous night to whip up a few new images and print them in full color.

Since I don’t have access to a really cool high-end imaging program like Adobe Illustrator, a program I am very familiar with (or was, years ago) due to my past employment as a graphic illustrator for digital publishing, I used what I had available to me, and was surprised at how affective it was to use Microsoft Visio as a graphics program. This is another tool I used often in my current vocation to make detailed network diagrams, but it can do quite a bit, even working with imported “bitmap” files from the web.

What I focused on here was a few areas where I had the most immediate need: a sign for the new 2^nd pedestrian gantry, and new labels for the 2 Atlas grandstands, as well as finally doing away with that awful “Star*ucks” logo that I bought my refreshment stand with; I’d been wanting to get rid of that for a couple of years!

The bad news there is that the adhesive I used for this first signage redo attempt was the spray adhesive, which had the effect of making the copy paper I printed the new label on somewhat translucent so that, although it adhered well, the original advert showed through. That was a valuable learning experience and I’m glad I learned it here! The solution was to simply cut out a second one and paste it over the first attempt, and adhere it with rubber cement.

I was concerned about the Atlas Grandstands; I knew that if I glued a new paper banner over the original one that reads “Hillside Motor Raceway, Inc.” I was likely to ruin it. It’s unlikely that I’m ever going to sell these, but of course we always think that, without being able to anticipate what will happen in the future, and considering how valuable these are and how hard it was to obtain them, I want to try to preserve them as much as possible. Even so, I can’t have adverts for a different fictitious race track at my own fictitious race track, so I had to redo the signage. I did some research on “temporary” or “reuseable” glues, and although it seems like such a thing existed, I was unable to find any, with a trip to both Michaels and Hobby Lobby bearing no fruit. In the end I decided on rubber cement as having the best chance of both allowing me to install my new paper labels without wrinkling them and giving me at least a fighting change of removing them in the future while leaving he original labels in tact. In truth, it may not turn out that way, but its my hope that we will never have to find out! Even so, I’m pretty happy with the results!

Now for my next trick, I’m going to have to start focusing on some of the signage on the buildings along the business route, replacing all the “Plasticville” logos with correct names. That’s going to be a lot more of a challenge, since the signs on the buildings are extruded into them as part of the plastic, so I will have to come up with some way to overlay those in a way that doesn’t look too contrived; merely pasting paper cutouts over them, as I did in the examples shown here, won’t be enough, and I haven’t figured that out yet. Still, these little additions look pretty good, I think. I’m anxious to hear your feedback, race fans; how would you go about making your own signage for these items?

Next up, the Marque logo signs for Pit Row! Stay tuned, you know there’s always something new and exciting @ DRAG CITY!