Buildings for AK-47 Republic

My son recently purchased some buildings for our ongoing (well, at this moment, his ongoing) AK-47 project. As he is eyeballs-deep in painting minis I offered to paint the building that had just arrived. He had ordered them from Fieldworks ( http://www.fieldworks.org.uk/index.htm ) and they are beauties indeed! Except for the epoxy smell, that is.

Molded in a medium gray hard resin they are nicely proportioned and have thin walls and floors (very important in this scale) that are loaded with details. These represent battle-damaged building with pockmarks and shell holes all-around.

First step was to wash them in hot water with dish-soap to remove the mold release and then out to the garage for a spray with flat black primer. Once than had dried they recieved a heavy dry-brushing with medium gray.

As always, click on the picture to enlarge



did I mention that they have internal floors

 

Then an equally heavy dry-brush with Dolphin Gray to bring up the surface details, This was them highlighted with white to pick out the fine details.

On projects this size I use the sort of cheap paintbrushes sold at home-improvement store as "single-use". The beauty of really cheap brushes is that you can treat them hard and not worry about the investment. They actually stand up to some pretty hard use, as is seen below;

I have had this brush for several years now, it sees this sort of use a lot

This is what they looked like after the white highlights;

This where you need to decide how nuts you are going to get with stuff, at this point I often chump-out and just throw some ground cover around them and call it a day. These were supposed to be for AK-47 and/or Lebanon so I just couldn't leave them looking like some Soviet era concrete structure, more needed to be done! One thing I have seen of tropical cultures is that they like bright colors but I didn't want to make it look like Disney's Tropical Resort so I toned things down a bit. I decided to paint the sills and frames of the windows and doors a medium red color.

I find it easier to paint all the verticals first, then the horizontals

I think it turned out OK, not too garish.

On the fancier building I used a darker red for details and added tan panels between the windows to break up the massive surface. I then went through and added concrete colored paint to the damage from bullet and shell inpacts. The rubble lying around was washed with a medium brown and then highlighted with a pale tan, I will go back and pick out some concrete bits in gray later and then add a wash over everything to pull all the colors together.

There are two more buildings to paint, hopefully I can get to those tomorrow. They are very nice two-storey apartment blocks.

Fieldworks makes some pretty good stuff, check out their website. And finally, when you are out and about check out your local arts and crafts store (in my neck of the woods that means Hobby Lobby or Michael's) for the full range of acrylic paints, these come in a simply staggering array of colors and are very affordable.Below you see the colors I used today.

Have fun, keep painting!     John