Building Bridges – Day 3

Well today has been an action packed fun fest of spray paint, glue and salt! Today I started with some weathering on the bridge. IMG_20150819_094510

Here I’m using Forge World weathering pigments Aged Rust and highlighting with Light Rust. I’ve gone fairly heavy on the rust because most of it will be covered by the top coat and I want to make sure we see the rust colour beneath when I do the paint chips.

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After that I did the same to the lower sections of the bridge (I might do a little more tomorrow.) Then it was on with the spray paint. First up I attacked the Shop and Scrapyard inserts with some marble paint. IMG_20150819_100240

And while that was drying I took a photo of the work I did last night on distressing the scrapyard gates. I’ve written up a full tutorial on this for those that want it. IMG_20150819_114113

After that I varnished the bridges to seal in the rust using Army Painter Quickshade Soft Tone dip. Now I bought this a while ago for speeding up my basecoating process. The idea being to paint a mini in a light colour, dip and then add colour blocks. However Quickshade takes 24 hours to dry and it dries shiny and because it’s a varnish it also rounds out the details slightly. All this meant that I abandoned using Quickshade but I thought it might be useful here. I also applied a layer to the marble brick work above to add some shading. The jury is still out on whether it was worth waiting 24 hours for!

At some point today I also did all the arches in their base coat but I seem to have forgotten to photograph them. However the process was fairly straight forward. Full coat of red, then three successive coats of Orange mist. By this I mean I stood over a foot away from the model and sprayed a fine mist of orange in its general direction.

While I waited for all this to dry I worked on some graphics for the floor of the shop, archway and Scrapyard. The tiles I’m using for my roads are from World Works Games so I wanted to apply the same pavement textures to my floor tiles as are on my roads. I also didn't want to spend hours painting a design for the shop/scrapyard floor that will only be seen through a window or a door so I printed those too. The shop floor was my own design while the wooden floor is from World Works.

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With the designs printed and cut I used spray glue to attach them. I used spray glue instead of PVA to avoid the paper becoming saturated, but spray glue does get everywhere and it’s awfully sticky! IMG_20150819_150502

Flipping the tiles over I used a sharp knife to trim everything to size and cut out the holes for the walls to plug in to. And the end result looked something like this. See, I told you I’d done some brick work. IMG_20150819_151627

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Next it was time for the rather gross part of the proceedings. The varnish probably still needed some time to dry but as I’m running out of time I wanted so see if the weathering/paint blistering will work so I can at least start the second bridge. So, it was time to apply the salt. This is done using siliva, applied with a brush of course, I’m not a total savage.

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After doing one side I decided the salt particles were too big so I improvised a pestle and mortar (an old lens cap and a big bolt) and mashed up the salt into smaller pieces. Once the whole thing was salted I wrapped the ends of the bridge in masking tape, along with the bed of the bridge and set about spraying.

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First up was an undercoat of gravel. Then Skeleton Bone Primer from Army Painter.

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Finally a coat of marble. IMG_20150819_165704

Once it’s all dry I’ll paint the struts of the bridge green and then chip away the salt to reveal the weathering below.

Finally with not much of the day left I decided that the work printer was good enough to do posters for the city. IMG_20150819_173011

Everything came out great but I think I need to create a “safe area” in my template to stop things getting cut off by the frame, like poor Chewbacca in the top left. Each poster is deliberately too big with a small amount of bleed that will be cut away at the end. The current plan is to magnetise the posters to the walls in such a way as they can be changed to reflect different scenarios.

Well that’s it for today. I hope you guys are enjoying this project as much as I am.

Until tomorrow…

The Duke

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