Painting the Town

You probably noticed that this has become a weekly blog.  I burned through my backlog pretty quick.  At this point, I'll just plug away at the new work during the week and throw up odd thoughts when I get the chance.  Sunday night is the best night for posting, but don't be surprised if I toss in the odd mid-week update here and there.

Enough about me, onto the terrain...

In a bit of a departure from my usual (paint everything in one color first) modus operandi, I'm painting the Big Town a few pieces at a time.  The actual color scheme shown here consists of blue floors with purple walls and gold highlights.  This color scheme should be somewhat familiar to you Halo fans.  Frankly, I didn't think this would work as well as it is, but I let my son pick the colors, and he was pretty adamant about them.  This is a work in progress, and it should look a lot better once I get some steel and shading in there.

Let's start with the park in the lower left hand corner of the above shot.  Using green scrubber pads for hedges is an old grognard trick.  To really make them look sharp, I've drybrushed them with green and yellow paint.  To keep their shape, I drilled holes through the craft board and hot glued short lengths of dowel for posts.  In the shot to the right you can see that I also folded them in half.  This gives them more thickness and a nice round curve to the top, and it also makes them more stable and less crushable in the storage box.

The texture on the ground surface was made by applying a coat of paint, tossing on a bit of sand, and then a few more coats of paint.  Brown drybrushed with gold brings out the texture and make it look dirtish.  Eventually, I'll apply green flocking for grass, but that has to wait until the painting is complete.

The sidewalks are sort of modular.  In this shot you can see how they almost line up.  Sometimes you get weird artifacts where one block of sidewalk sits alone in a corner, but for the most part, they help tie each the individual tiles together into a unit.

The fountain was made from a 1.5" PVC cap glued into a plastic flower pot base.  It needs blue paint and fake water yet, and I'm thinking about painting a miniature gray and sticking it on there as a statue.  That might make it tough to store that tile, though, so I haven't decided.