4th Street at Dorchester Avenue

[nk]

I am making a model of the street outside my apartment building in South Boston. The view is (corrected for parallax):



I thought I would start with the most challenging part, which is to make the road markings. As you know, these are sprayed paint but applied very wet and have a distinct thickness and applied as a band about 12"  (30cm) wide with a distict ridged surface.

After lots of experimenting, I found that I could mask out a shape on thick mylar, apply the paint (Golden liquid acrylics) and smooth it out with a squeegee (The squeegee is used to apply a clear film to a cellphone). The thickness of the masking tape is about right for a scale paint-film thickness, and roughness of the the tape causes the squeegee to move unevenly and give the top of the paint a ridged appearance. I removed the tape as quickly as possible to allow the paint to flow a little and have a rounded edge.

It took most of the day to get this far, but luckily there was a blizzard going on outside, so I had nothing else to do!



I think it gives the correct apprarance of a painted traffic arrow. Now I have to let it dry for a week of so and then I can peel it off the mylar and stick it onto the base. Then I can weather it with a q-tip and solvent to get a good worn effect.

Since my bottle of Skull White from CItadel has dried up, I am looking for a nice replacement acrylic to give a cracked paint line...more soon.

[Chuck Doan]

Good to see a new project!

[nk]

The base is made. I used cherry plywood and cherry edging. I am branching out from my usual dark walnut stain and I like how it matches my new desk! There is also a cherry spacer to give it a floating look, rather than sitting flush with the display surface.

[Ray Dunakin]

Interesting approach on painting the arrow.

[chester]

Good to see another street from you. I'm particular to cherry with no color.

[nk]

A quick update.
I made a Boston street grate out of extruded rod, sheet styrene and injection moulded letters. It took a lot of scalpel nibbling and then filing with a triangular file to get the shapes right but it looks good test fitted in place.




And the easy part was buying some 1/24 manhole covers from Dave at Vectorworks. I used one OOB and the other I made a new rim to have a slightly misfitting cover

[finescalerr]

Nice to see you back at work. -- Russ

[marc_reusser]

I agree with Russ..so great to see you back at this. Always a joy to watch and a lots to learn. I missed the arrow technique post earlier....what a great trick. Definitely ome to remember. Thanks.

[nk]

Thanks Russ. Its nice to be back at the bench. Marc: very happy to be of service. I can feed you the ideas and you can execute them more finely than I could ever hope.

A quick update. One line was painted directly onto the surface and attached immediately with masking tape and a scalpel to weather it. The other thicker stripe was painted out onto mylar and then peeled off and glued onto the base. This is yet to be weathered, but I like the thickness of the paint on the road. And lastltly an overall with the arrow not stuck down. I am just working out its final location.

[nk]

All the pieces are glued into place. I used Elmers (PVA) to glue the arrow down as well as the BWSC plate, and superglue for the manhole covers. I filled the space between the studs on the BWSC plate with a sifted dirt and Elmer's glue to give a sense of trapped crud. I am very happy with all the different textures on this little scene.







Now to start the weathering...

[Chuck Doan]

Looking good, Narayan!

[nk]

I finally finished this one. It will be winging its way to Portugal shortly.

I had fun applying the oil drips to the road surface... I applied paint to a piece of dental floss and then stretched it taut and applied "drips" in a straight line to simulate oil leaking from a moving car. I found that I could use a fresh No.11 blade and carve in the cracks to the white paint and it looked pretty good, provided I followed the detailed reference pics I had. The weathering was very routine stuff.

Here is an overall:


And some details

[marc_reusser]

This looks realy nice. The weathering, oil and cracks in the paint came out great. Really a wonderful study of these details. I really enjoyed seeing this develop, it brought a lot of interesting details to light, that I had never noticed before (such as the arrow stem tapering, and the oddly layered paint thicknesses). I also like haow you have take the same basic elements as at the real intersection, and done just a slight bit of adjustment, to make the composition be visually better balanced.

[Ray Dunakin]

Yeah, what Marc said!

[finescalerr]

Adequate. -- Russ