I used Blender 3D Software to model an old-fashioned Hardware Store, Ramapo Hardware. This was a real business in Monsey, New York that my family owned and operated from 1952-2019. We moved locations in 2010, but this was our original location. I shared some photos below of the real store for comparison.

We only rented the lower left (Hardware Store) portion of the building... but there were several restaurants next door over the years. Usually some sort of deli or pizza place, so I made a "Joe's Deli" sign for this part. The nickname for our Hardware Store was "Joe's" since that was my Grandfather's first name so it seemed fitting.

The signs in all of the windows were the usual signs that we actually had up in the real store. My sister would often print signs just using Microsoft Word, such as the "Parking Entrance In Rear" sign of the front door.

We were a licensed Benjamin-Moore Paint Distributor for that area, so we had a giant Benjamin Moore Paint sign as well as the bright neon version in our window of the real store. I did not want to use their logo for this project, so I created a similar shaped logo with my name and icon on it instead - "Exzilibus Paints".

The 2 SKIL power tools in the upper right corner of the blue risers are 2 products we actually sold. I used image texturing on top of cubes using real photographs I took from years ago to recreate these. The AC filter and Toilet Seat in the upper left corner were also used with this method. Everything else was re-created from scratch. We actually did have a row of giant cardboard paint cans for Ben Moore advertising, so I created my own Exzilibus Paint Labels for these. I made generic box labels for the other products.

I tried for detail and accuracy here, so almost every item in these windows are the actual types of items we would really have out on display to grab attention to the front of the store. I used basic cylinders, squares, and rectangles to model all of the items and re-used as much of the same geometry as possible, such as the same wooden handle for every rake and shovel.

This is a side-by-side comparison of the real window next to my modeled version for both windows.

Another comparison, but the full front view.

We left this location in 2010 to a much nicer, bigger place across the street. Sadly, nothing ever became of this place after we left. This is the current street view image (taken in November 2021) from Google Maps, 11 years after we left. The owners of the building just use this place as a storage unit for their other properties  and they rent out parking spaces in the back.

These are the real door signs we had up for many years at the store. I recreated our real store hours sign using Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator for any vector work. The upper half of the "Paint Sale" sign is a real screenshot of our real website that I created right after we moved from this location, so it was nice to bring in a real touch of our real website into this photo somewhere as an easter egg for myself and family. I put my own art/portfolio website URL down at the bottom of the Paint Sale banner too.

Although I used real photographs for 4 of the store "items", I wanted to just make my own mockup labels and box designs for most of these. This image below is all of the extra signs and digital assets I needed for these parts. I would make the main design of each one using Adobe Illustrator, and then I would bring those into Photoshop to add any photos or paint in any other needed details. I didn't go too crazy on details and start adding weights on the bottoms of the boxes or anything like that, because I knew most of the angles would be further away and those wouldn't be readable anyway.