Painting my Team Yankee Petrol Station

Its funny what you get excited about when a new project rolls through the Studio and in the case of Team Yankee I'm on a real high about the terrain. I've been mucking about with making some terrain bases (more on this later) for me to put buildings on, making up car parks etc and painting up my Petrol Station.

The original inspiration to do a little work on it came from Casey who whipped up some pump signs and posters to decorate your station. From here I did a little digging and found a wonderful reference photo of a Lego Shell Petrol Station and decided that would be my inspiration. 

Painting the station was actually quite easy. I have a pile of different widths of masking tape thanks to a few earlier projects and I just progressively masked and spray my colours on. It's important to leave each colour to dry thoroughly before masking for the next stage, to make sure the tape doesn't pull off paint that hasn't cured fully.... I learnt that one the hard way.

The station passes the table top test but if you look a little close you can see places where the colours have bled under the masking tape. But on the table it looks great - especially with an M1 about to drive through!

First pass with the masking tape.

Last colour going on.

Finished with some posters added. The Pepsi poster was attacked with a knife to make it look faded and ripped.

Whereas the Coke poster is untouched and new!

Finished, on the table.

Tablescapes Urban Tiles: Base Coats

I've been struggling to do anything major over the past month or so but I've been able to chip away at my Secret Weapon Tablescapes Urban Tiles every now and then as I only needed to pop out to the garage to 5-10 minutes to spray a colour half dozen tiles. Over the course of a couple of weeks it mean that I have gone from Black Primer, to Dark Grey all over, to Medium Grey on the sidewalks and a light patchy dusting on the roads.

Next up is to paint the metal bits with a gunmetal colour and airbrush a lighter grey on each of the individual sidewalk tiles - that is going to be the really time consuming part. Once that is done I'll put some road markings on, must first experiment using a mask made from CCG cards worked badly so I will be picking up some low tac painters masking tape and trying again. After that I will mix up a few batches of oil washes - one brown, one black and one brown/black and apply liberally... at least that is the plan!

Cheap spray cans from my local Bunnings (NZ DIY store)

Laid out in my garage. Don't skimp on the newspaper surround. I have a large "overspray" of black and grey paint on the concrete now. Luckily its just the garage.

Sold coat of the dark grey spray on the tiles.

After the dark grey I used the plastic lid from an FFG Imperial Assault Carrier packaging to mask off the footpath and gutter whilst spraying the light grey on the sidewalks.

And I made a mask out of two old Battletech CCG cards and a lot of packing tape to help with the corners

And this is what 6 (out of the 32) tiles look like. Right now they all look like this (except 2 test ones) so I have a lot of airbrushing to do.

Each one of those tiles will need to be airbrushed using another card template. I've made one for the smaller "plaza" sidewalk tiles and I need to make a second one for the bigger sidewalk tiles.

And each square gets airbrushed from a different direction so that when a table is laid out the hightlighting of each individual sidewalk tile blends it all together.

Once it is all done, I still need to find some fairly generic 28mm buildings that I like to finish the whole thing off.