So near, and yet so far!
Most of the buildings for The Town with No Name are painted. All that remains are the Undertakers', the Saloon with attached house of ill repute, the church and the Livery Stable. Of course, I've still to sort out the signs and posters for all the buildings, but I'm actually quite looking forward to that.
Which brings the revelation that I've somehow saved myself the largest jobs until last. I don't know why. I've been wanting to paint the Saloon ever since I built it. Maybe it was the fear of making the finished paint job look as good as the models did when I had finished constructing them. That's what I used to think anyway.
But now I know the truth!
IT'S FEAR OF THE SHINGLES!!!!!!
And for a good reason too! I could have chosen to tar paper roof any number of buildings. And to be honest, I always planned to. But as this blog will amply prove, whenever I made a building, I went on and shingled its roof as if on auto pilot. In fact, only one single building ended up tar paper roofed. And the one I chose was one of the smallest shops I've made. Which is great, until the time comes round to painting them.
 |
| There's the only Tar Paper Roofed Building, the shop with the yellow frontage! |
I've already explained how I made the shingle roofs in a previous post. (See Down Among the Dead Men...and some Nice Cabinets!) And I'm quite proud of the way I paint them. But boy do they take an age! The roof is given a base coat of approximately equal parts black and brown acrylic paint. Then I individually paint every single shingle, leaving a thin line of the undercoat where the shingles join each other. On a normal building, this takes a while. On something like the livery stable, it takes FOREVER!
Don't believe me? Here's photographic evidence!
 |
| Yup. Each one of them. By hand. |
Yup. Every single one of them. I can normally paint three shingles with each brush load of paint. This obviously gives a natural variation in the depth of shade on each one. Painting in a random rather than regular way helps to give slight variation of colour over the whole roof. This obviously needs to be left to dry before the next stage. Which is not a problem, because I've normally lost the will by then.
All that remains is to make up a black wash and apply along each row of shingles. I normally do this in three stages, each stage narrower than the previous one. This allows me to ad a gradient and give an impression of shading that works really well and saves having to add that process into the individual painting of the shingles. Which really would be a bridge to far. Well, a roof anyway!
Of course, I can't show you this stage on the livery stable, because I still have a few hundred shingles to paint! This may take a while...
Comments
Post a Comment