Woolworth art deco store front

[Kasper-V]

'Woolies' opened their 46th store in England in my home town Walsall in 1915. I have happy memories (though no earlier than the 1950s!) of the old shop floors and fittings before it was modernised several times, and it eventually closed when the chain folded. The top half has the modern two-tone paint job, but the ground floor is as near as I can make it to the original.

This was a challenge (read: pain in the backside) because of all the fine detail and all in the same flat colour. For the upper part, I made up the left-hand side, then the left half of the middle brown & white section, then the left-hand window panels; the windows are a single symbol. After that I copied and flipped them all and joined them up. The lower windows are all copies (not symbols) of the leftmost one, and the doors are also copies. For the window 'displays' I went into Photo and used Perlin noise with a gradient mask against a dark background layer. All the lights are off because I couldn't find a detailed reference picture!

If you can't see the four tiny lions' heads, here's one full size:

[Kasper-V]

I used some of my own photos, with help from Google Street View and photos I found online. Correcting for perspective was not a big problem, but allowing for parallax was!

[dannyg9]

Amazing detail! I do question what's going on Inside the glass as it seems, to these eyes, like leopard "blobs" overtaking all (as in the movie "The Blob"). That aside, really splendid work.

[Kasper-V]

57 minutes ago, dannyg9 said:

I do question what's going on Inside the glass as it seems, to these eyes, like leopard "blobs" overtaking all (as in the movie "The Blob").

I couldn't find a suitable image online to use as reference, and I didn't fancy trying to make up the myriad small objects that might have been on display; I was more interested in the stonework. I could have made random changes to all the windows, but . . . too much trouble! (But you're welcome to have a go yourself 😁)