Paint Table Saturday 11 September

 As you can see, there has been a lot of progress on the jungle buildings since Wednesday. On Thursday, after some quick size checks, I decided to spray the buildings indoors rather than wait for a sunny day and clear garden. Not my preferred option, but needs must.

The spray paints I've used are Halfords Camo Dark Brown, followed by a dusting of Halfords Camo Khaki from a high angle to add a first highlight.

I also carried on with the water tank. I got it nicely rusted up on Thursday, then yesterday I textured and painted the base:

Yesterday also saw me adding drybrush highlights to the wood on all of the buildings. I also dry-brushed the thatch:

I started out today intending just to work on the buildings with wriggly-tin and the tool shed which I've given tar strip roofing. The metal was base-coated with thinned down VMA Tank Brown; the tar strips with thinned VMC Black:

Using some foam ripped from a figure tray insert, I splodged VMA Light Rust onto the metal:

I then drybrushed with VMC Oily Steel; the tar strips were drybrushed with VMC Grey Green and VMC London Grey:

The metal was then washed with heavily thinned VMA light rust:

The metal was finished off with more splodging of VMA Light Rust, a light splodging of VMA Orange Rust and a final light drybrush of VMC Oily Steel:

As that was all done much earlier than I'd expected, I mixed up a batch of ink wash to stain the woodwork, then applied it to all of the buildings. Unfortunately I forgot to take a comparison photo of stained and unstained.

Tomorrow I'll be texturing the bases:

I'll have to do that in two batches as there isn't enough room on the bench to work on them all at the same time. I probably won't get around to painting the texture tomorrow, so that will be a fairly quick job for Monday. The final job will be to add static grass - if I'm lucky, that will get done on Monday, but I suspect that it will be a Tuesday morning job.

Update: Naff all on the telly, so I decided to add the basing texture - only took about an hour including all the cleaning up!

Wednesday Workbench 08 September

I'm kicking myself. Despite having just had three sunny, dry days in a row I haven't been able to finish priming and do first highlights on the buildings.

Monday - gas engineers were in to replace some of my gas pipework after a leak had been detected. Fortunately the leak was right where the pipe met the brickwork outside my flat; unfortunately it was quite a big hole which has probably been there for years, meaning that I have been venting quite a bit of gas into the atmosphere (not to mention paying for it!). By the time they were all done and I'd moved things back to where they normally sit it was too late and too hot to think about doing any spraying.

Tuesday - I hadn't slept well and by the time I was properly awake it was too hot to think about spraying.

Today - I overslept this morning but was ready and raring to go with the spraying. However, I happened to look out of my back window before starting to cart everything down to the back garden and saw that my downstairs neighbours had washing hanging out to dry on their clothes lines. Scuppered! 

Hopefully I'll be able to get it done tomorrow morning.

Rather than waste any more time, I decided to start on the one piece that was already fully primed - the water tank. I base-coated and highlighted the steel using the airbrush, then gave it a wash of Agrax Earthshade. When the wash was fully dry I drybrushed all over with a steel colour. I'm trying to decide whether to leave it as bare metal or to give it a peeling paint look.

Paint Table Saturday 04 September

 

The toweling on the roofs has now completely dried. This afternoon I trimmed the excess around the edges and reglued the strips where they weren't firmly stuck (mostly at the corners and along some edges).

Tomorrow I'll be hitting them with a sealing coat of 10% matte medium using the airbrush. The weather forecast for the start of the week looks good for taking them outside to finish the priming and do first highlights using spray cans.

Wednesday Workbench 01 September

 

For the past couple of days I have been busily thatching the remaining jungle buildings. The first stage was to cut some cheap hand towels from a pound shop into long strips of roughly equal width, then to cut the strips into shorter lengths to fit the different roofs.

The next step was to start adding the strips to the roofs, then when the initial glue had dried to soak the towel strips with dilute PVA.

I got the four small buildings done on Monday, but they weren't fully dry until today. This evening I have done the roofs of the three large buildings. The photo at the top of this post shows them before soaking with dilute PVA. I've just done the soaking and they are now drying:

I expect they won't be fully dry until Friday. Tomorrow, when they are partly dry I will give them a blast with a hairdryer to speed things up a little.

The final steps, before painting, are to trim the overhangs and to give them a coat of scenic cement (10% matte medium with a little flow aid) - I can probably airbrush that on. Then all I have to do is wait for a dry day (or even a dry morning or afternoon) so that I can take them outside to finish priming them and do the first highlights of the woods using a spray paint. 

Paint Table Saturday 28 August

 

As you can see, I have started work on pimping the MDF buildings for my jungle terrain. These three will be for my plantation area.

Most of the other buildings will have thatched roofs. I'll start work on those tomorrow.

Finished: Large Secondary Jungle Bases

 

I a slightly surprising turn of events, I actually managed to finish these today and to sort out (temporary at least) storage for them.

As usual, our trusty Aussie Commando has made his way into the photos.

There are two bases which can be used separately as corner pieces or together as edge pieces:

The four large bases all pretty much cover an A4 board:

The two large non-corner/edge bases:

The three medium bases:

The bases I used for these are from Wargames Tournaments.

Other than the buildings (which I will be working on next), that will be it for jungle terrain for a while. I might do some more scatter pieces in the future for my "transportable" terrain, but that will be a while off.

Wednesday Workbench 25 August

These pieces are taking much longer to finish than I'd expected. That's mostly because of the increased drying times. I might have them finished tomorrow, but Friday is now more likely.

Of course, the next problem is going to be organising storage for them!