Blue man base and some paving stone experiments

Base with plastic card top

With blue man almost done I started working on a small display base for him, just because I can.  Keeping it cheap I cut up some offcuts of pine and made a 40x45mm pedestal for him.  After sanding it down a bit I painted with a few coats of a gloss black.  I also put dark green felt underneath.  Once you start felting you can’t stop.

Everything looks better in gloss black and green felt

For the display portion I wanted to keep with the 1950’s feel.  So I decided to make a linoleum floor with a wooden bar on one side.  Rather than paint directly on the wood I cut a piece of plastic card to size and painted that.  After undercoating black I painted a tile pattern in a nice, ugly egg shell blue tile with an alternate mustard yellow tile.  Reminds me of the floor from many an old government building of my youth.  I used the VMA colours Blue (71.008) and Yellow Ochre (71.033).  I’ve varnished the piece and intend to finish it off with some oil washes.

Unpainted section is where the bar goes

The partial bar I made out of balsa wood over a polystyrene core.  I simulated planking by scoring the balsa wood with a ball point pen.  Plastic card covers the two external sides as they will be painted black.  So far all I’ve done is a light brown (ala pine) colour.  A lot more washes, etc will be needed.

As a break of figure painting I did some experimentation with oil washes.  Using one of the J’s work pavement pieces (PA3018 1/35 Pavement 1) I undercoated the the piece in a mid grey, a mixture of the light grey and black Vallejo primers.  I then painted at random a number of the pavement stones in different colours from dark brown, light brown, various greys, etc.  I was trying to simulate a road made up mainly of one type of stone but with the normal variations you would see in times past.  Unlike today where all the stone is usually colour matched old roads were a bit more of what you could find.  All these colours were standard Vallejo paints.

Pavement underway

For the weathering I used oil paints.  This is the second time I’ve tried them out (inspired by the examples I see in the military model world) and I’m really starting to like the effects.  I made a number of washes starting with a grey wash (matching the grey of the majority of the pavements) and added either burnt umber, burnt sienna, yellow ochre, black to the mix and for mold added viridian.

I did a dark brown/olive wash over the entire piece first and then did different colour washes in different segments (each segment a 2-6 pavement stones).  I did a few layers of the green wash (from dark olive green up to bright green) for the mold areas making sure I got a lot of green colour in the pavement cracks as this is where mold normally grows - away from the traffic/wear areas.  In the end most of the piece was covered in 4-7 washes.  This really gives it a lovely worn in appearance.  Also each oil wash mixes slight with the previously so you don’t get the blend lines like you do with acrylic paints.  At the end I did some dry smearing with some light greys to white on the raised surfaces of the pavement stones.  Again oils are very nice to work with because if the highlight is too much you just smear it with your finger and it all tones back in.  Much like the colour spotting technique from the scale model world.

At the end of it I was pretty chuffed with the result.  It kind of looks like it’s been there for awhile and never been cleaned.  A real worn in road pavement piece.  Starting to really dig this $7.50 set of oil paints.  Need to try the red paints in the range next.