Having been insanely busy recently I've not had much time for scenery or painting models - however the upcoming Autumn Challenge at the end of the month has prompted me to get some new scenery done!
Having received a big order from Antenociti recently, I started with the acrylic Police barriers.
These are laser-cut from orange acrylic but the text isn't very visible:
So I decided to take that old D&D dice trick and use a white crayon to fill the text. However, due to the other etched lines nearby this required some careful masking:
Once most of the excess crayon had been removed the masking tape could come off and the last bits of excess crayon removed:
Overall I'm very happy with these, they help add cover to random areas of the table and the white text really lifts them up.
Next, vehicles. I treated myself to to the huge £75 Metropol set, on the grounds that 11 bigger vehicles and 16 of the little egg cars would provide scatter terrain for 2-3 tables in one go, or actually form a big chunk of a single urban table.
Still not having really sorted out an airbrush, I decided to try some masking with spraycans and see how things went. The first three test vehicles (Taxi, Fugly and Kuripot 'egg') got a black undercoat followed by a roughly zenithal white overspray. A day later I then masked off the window sections on the taxi and egg, the Fugly was too complex, then used assorted Army Painter colours:
After plenty of time to dry, the masking tape was removed! The basic idea worked, but the white overspray would have worked much better if done in parallel stripes as it was too even. But then, that's why these are the experiment...
Picking out the tyres in black, the Fugly windows in a dull blue mix and dulling down the egg windows with some swipes of thinned down dull blue, plus a brown ink wash over the red areas of the Fugly:
They're starting to look more like real items instead of big blocks of resin. :-)
The final step (for now) was to do the lights, a little bit of edge highlighting and some lining washes on the egg and Fugly. The reflected skyscrapers on the egg have worked really well, although that's Dwartist's idea rather than mine. The taxi still looks a little unfinished for the windows, I might have to add some hatched mid-grey lines, the opposite of the mid-grey lines used to 'unflatten' the Fugly windows:
Anyway, for scatter terrain I'm calling these done! Only another 24 to go...
Ian
