Hi All,

Proud to say that as of today, the board has entered the final touches stage!! Huzzah!

The cobblestones are painted, the sewer is.. er minging. There’s snow, there’s revealed concrete!

Here’s what I’ve done:

To start off with this is as far as we’d gotten so far, the cobblestones were flat grey from a Halfords spray can and the snow was white (as good snow should be!).

The thing about cobblestones, is that they don’t tend to be a uniform colour – the flat grey really exaggerated this crying need for variety. However, the problem was that there was no way on earth I was going to sit down and paint every individual stone!

So I thought to myself, “What would Luke Skywalker do?” and then it hit me…

The first thing I did this morning was to select a few good colours to use as cobblestones, these were Citadel (old and new) Bubonic Brown, Death World Forest, Fortress Grey, Space Wolves Grey, and Dawnstone. Then all I did was sit with a board on my knee, starting with one colour, and just pick odd stones out. My rule of thumb was to paint a stone every inch or two.

I’d do this for each board, then move onto the next colour – it only took about 45 minutes in total. Here’s what it looked like at this stage:

Looking pretty decent I thought, but still flat, so it was time to add depth. I’d been mulling over this one for a few weeks and in advance had settled on buying a tin of Strong Tone, Army Painter Quickshade Dip. This stuff is essentially like a wash and a varnish combined. You’re supposed to use it to literally dip your models in (more on that another time). But I just sploshed it on my streets with an old house brush. It’s varnish properties will make a big difference to the durability of the Plaster of Paris cobblestones.

It goes on like syrup and takes a few moments to sink in to the recesses, but panic not, for it does eventually sink in 🙂

A couples of minutes later and we had this:

What a transformation! As you can tell, I was well chuffed with that. I quickly brought my other boards up to the same standard, then sat them to dry all day. Literally all day. This stuff stays sticky like syrup for hours and hours, and it dries glossy.

Next step was to get rid of that gloss, so I gave the whole thing a spray down with canned mat varvish. That took the shine off straight away and made a big difference. I suppose, if you wanted a wet look you could leave it glossy, but that wouldn’t do for me 🙂

Next I wanted to bring it back up a bit so I took my Space Wolves Grey and drybrushed all the cobbles using my old house brush. Here was the effect:

Lol. You can’t really see the drybrushing in the picture. Trust me, it’s there.

Last of all I figured it was about time to make progress on the open sewer. I had about half a cup of mixed PVA and water sat on my desk which I needed to use up, so I added in a good dollop of old Citadel Foundation, Orkhide Shade and gave it a stir with my brush, then, making sure the open end of the sewer was blocked off, I just bit the bullet and poured it all in…

Lookin’ green!

That’ll have to do for now, hopefully it’s convinced you all that I’m still chugging away on my board and making progress 🙂 If you have any questions, or like what you’ve seen, please drop me a comment below the line. Additionally, if you want to add me on facebook, you can find me from the button below.

Jimmi Waz ‘Ere

Thanks,

Jimmi