Build thread - Luigi's Restaurant - Walls

First Post for this thread

 In my previous post, I only posted pictures of the front wall.  This was due to the fact that I'm writing up this build after completing most of it (unorthodox approach, I know), and for some reason I only took pictures of the front wall at the beginning.  During the build, I weathered all of the walls together, in lock-step, to keep them consistent with each other.  In the early step, I overlooked the chimney, and had to catch it up.  My experience is that once part of a model falls out of sync, it can be difficult or impossible to re-sync it with its colleagues, but in the case of the chimney, the soot can be heavier than the wall without looking off, or so I hope.

In the first image, I've added several more coats of the India ink grime I described in my previous post. I've also added several rough rectangles of paint along the bottom story of one of the walls.

These represent an ongoing battle between the building owner and local graffiti artists. The paint used to cover graffiti typically doesn't match the rest of a wall, yielding off-color patches, as seen here. These patches are also frequently messily applied, more with an eye to cover the graffiti than to make a neat rectangle. Since weeks, months, or years would have passed between patches being applied, I add several coats of grime between each layer of patches.

In the third image, the chimney parts are above the second wall from the right. This is where I realized I had overlooked them, and moved them to the painting area so they would get grimed in future coats. The panels for bricking-out windows are also present and ungrimed, but this is by design. The story of the building is that it had all of its windows when it was built, with two at the ground level being bricked over many years after construction. Thus, those bricks should look newer than the rest of the building.

If you zoom in on the brick-out panels, you'll see a bit of flash at their corners. This is typical for these kits - there is a little bit of clean-up to do, but not much. In this case, I easily removed the flash with a number 17 blade on my hobby knife. This blade is like a chisel, and can be slid along a smooth surface to remove thin protrusions. Number 17 blades can be found with and without a circle on their shaft of the blade. I don't see that there's a difference in the function of the blade, but I find that the circle makes a good place to rest my finger, to apply some pressure to he blade to keep it against the work surface. I will point out that, like a wood chisel, the blade bevel is only on one face of the blade, meaning that the blade works differently with the bevel facing up versus facing down. Essentially, the bevel guides the blade; if the bevel is facing up, the blade can better dig into the work piece, whereas if the bevel faces down, the blade is better able to skate along the top of the work piece. Practice with scrap or extras if you're not certain on how to proceed.

Bricking over of windows is frequently done to a lower standard than the brickwork of the building itself. The bricks only need to support their own weight, and I'd guess that the work is rarely done by an actual mason, with generic mortar and bricks from the local hardware store rather than being color-matched to the rest of the building. Often, the work is done to look reasonable from the inside, with some squeeze-out or even voids visible from the outside. Here, I've used a light grey gauche paint to simulate the mortar (Neutral Grey 3, by Windsor and Newton). I smeared it onto the panel, then roughly wiped off the excess to leave the paint in the mortar lines. Some of the grey was left behind on the bricks, too, but that fits with the look of cheaply-done brickwork I'm going for. I was careful to keep the gauche off of the areas that I'd be applying glue, since I expect the paint would interfere there.

Once the paint had dried, I cemented the panels in place with the same liquid cement as before; and once the cement had dried, some further coats of grime (to all of the walls) made this fresh brick look less raw.

In this same image, along the decorative brickwork at the extreme right, you can see the sheen of the plastic I described earlier. If I had realized this here, I could have clear-coated with a flat finish, but by the time I noticed, I had the glazing in. Then, I would have had to mask off all of the windows, which was more than I saw myself doing. Further, the India ink isn't tightly attached to the model, so I'd probably have pulled it way from the window frames, leaving them looking strange. This was one of the lessons I learned form this build: paint everything, even if it's molded in color.

The last image shows the walls, ready to receive their windows. Clearly, for the moment, the graffiti artists have won. Since this model is a stand-alone, that becomes important, since otherwise there's no context for the painted-out rectangles. If this building was going into a layout where there was already graffiti, that graffiti might serve as the context, and the rectangles could serve on their own. If I wanted to get fancy, I could include a figure in the middle of painting out the graffiti. I could also show graffiti that was mostly painted out - in some cases you can see that the painter couldn't quite reach all of the graffiti, but painted out all that they could reach. Maybe in a later model, I'll do that.

I'll be covering the windows in the next post, but you can see one of the frames at the top left of the image. I had one or two windows left over from the last time I made this kit, and those provided sashes for the current model. You can see that I've already started trimming the part down for that conversion.

NEXT: Windows, including A/C units