Pavement

[Braxandur]

Since I have a table that is textures black gray which is useful as road I could choose between painting the sidewalks on or making them separately.

After quite some thought I'm going for the last because it gives more freedom in setting op scenery.

Having a day off is also great. In between working on my mad doctor I'm busy constructing the pavement for my city terrain.

I started out with big 5 mm thick polystyrene blocks:



After cutting these into strips of 5 cm wide I had quite a lot of material to build pavements from:



For the first test case I drew and the tiles to make sure they would look nicely (sizewise):



After this I used a pen to make deeper grooves following the drawn template:



A few conclusions a this point:
Drawing all the tiles take way to much times. For the next tiles I just mark a few dots and after that use a sharp knif to precut where I want to have the grooves. Only after that do I use the pen to deepen them a bit. Precutting also results into nices tiles.

I already painted a small square to see how the end result would be. Imporant to note is that using you fingers it is easy to just make some of the tiles a bit of uneven. In this case I didn't paint any dirt ow whatever on the pavement yet. putting some sand on, some weed between some tiles and maybe some paper, a soda cans and other dirt will enhance the pavement a lot. I'm sthinking about intrudusing some sewers gutters, but I'm not yet sure how to so this. As of yet I haven't made any corners yet, but have a lot of spare material letft to make them, just a some special tiles containing other scenery.



Comments and thoughts are welcome

[Glitzer]

How will you make it Base-proof? I found out that painting the material with wall-colour will make it more resistant, but I still hestitate to use them as floors (I still buy the more expensive foamcore for that), because the bases leave prints sometimes...

[Aaron]

You may find that the dark grey sidewalks blend in with the road a bit. For more contrast I have painted some of mine in more khaki/comcrete colors. It is all up to personal preference though.

[Braxandur]

Base-proof...?

hmm, I actually didn't t think about that, but for as far as I can see this stuff is quite sturdy. It already take quite an effort to make an impression, so I guess it will be quite okay...  Time will tell though..

[Braxandur]

except for the painting I finished  5M by 5cm of pavement, so it was time to see how much more is needed.  I did a test layout surrounding some of my buildings with pavement.






Sufficient to say that I defenitly need a lot more pavement, so more cutting is needed :S

Also saw that I needed to make a lot more special tiles, but for the rest I'm happy with how everything looks. I,ll be gone for the weekend though, so it will be a lot of work on moday

Also I'm planning to paint zebra crossings onto clear acetate and painting the stripes that are on the middle of a road (of which I have no clue how they are called in english) Already tested that once and it looked actually pretty good (not as god as painting them on off course...

[black hat miniatures]

Out of interest, are those the Amera buildings?

thanks

Mike

[Braxandur]

Yes indeed, they are the Amera Buildings.

One of them (the one one with the roof --> not the factory though) has been painted the "difficult" way, using first GW rough coat, then successive drybrushing and weathering. The rest was just sprayed black, followed by fast spraying with  white from a bit longer distance. After that the same weathering using VMC smoke, dabbed on en smudged with some tissue paper.

The drybrushed building is actually way nicer, feels better and is a bit more work. Well... actually it mostly only feels better. If you see the models from a distance longer then 40 cm, you can't see a lot of difference anymore, and even on pictures it looks great.

Next picture is a close up of the factory door and how the walls look after the "spraying" method:



On a side note, I think I need a few more of their buildings. especially the ministry building, of which I hope they will also sell me the think without the pillars, because it will give me a number of complete buildings.



 I also want to order the roads, but want to use them as a sort of canal. (then at least I can use my boats )

[Glitzer]

Is that ministry a new one from Amera?

I think It'll also look great as a Wild West city hall.

[Braxandur]

Another morgning of painting, and most of my sidewalks are finished. off vourse, I didn't make enough so I'll have to make more and a park and so on. Some scenery from black cat basing and ebay is on its way (lantern poles   ) but I ran out of foamcore  

At least a few more pictures to show how things start to look:

[Aaron]

For some reason those rounded corner sections really jump out at me, nice touch. I like it a lot. Now your vicious street gangs can stay safely out of traffic. ::

[Ironworker]

Nice job on these!  I like the rounded corners as well.

[Azzarc]

Nice stuff.  Thanks for posting.

[fritzy]

Nicely done, another how to stored away to do at a future date.

Cheers

Fritzy

[Hammers]

Braxandur, where do you find those 5mm sheets of foam?

[Braxandur]

Aah  well those very nice foam plates I actually founs as packaging for the TLC plates at our lab...

However I heard that they sell it at Harolds in Rotterdam.

Another option is buying 5mm foamboard online (I bought the black one) and then removing the paper layer (which is actually quite easy) Next time I'm going to ask if they also sell foma without the paper layers (not asking beforehand was how I ended up with 20 A2 sized sheets )