75mm blue man is done

Dapper Dan in blue

This week I finished off the base for blue man.  There were three parts: the floor, the bar and the bar clutter.

The black spot is the pin hole for the figure

The floor was given a very light oil wash of burnt sienna to simulate grime and dirt.  I was going to do more but the single wash looked pretty much what I wanted.  I then glued down the plastic card to the wood base and cleaned up the black paint around the edges.

For the bar I did a number of oil washes (burnt sienna, burnt umber, black) before lightening up (and simulating wood spots) with burnt sienna, yellow ochre and lemon yellow .  I also did the oil spot technique of putting on various colours and then blending them back into the piece with some thinner.  For the spot colours I used some reds, blues and white.  I was finding that the top of the bar was going green however, from the tan colour over the black undercoat.  To try and counter this I did a few washes of red to neutralise the green.

9/10 doctors recommend 'W' brand...

The bar top was going to need something to break up the space and also make it obvious that this was a bar.  I made an ashtray out of the top of dollhouse wooden balustrade which I hollowed out with a drill.  I painted this a sea green with some added pearlised paint mixed in to get a bakelite look.  The cigarette was a piece of plastic card rod.  It’s slightly out of scale but it’s the only rod I had and I think it needs to be a bit larger so you can see it.

I also cut up a small rectangle of plastic and painted it up to look like a Winston cigarette packet from the 1950’s.  I couldn’t paint the full ‘Winston’ so just went for a single central ‘W’.

Finally everything was glued down and blue man was done.  I nice experiment in 75mm which didn’t take too long or cost very much.