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...
This is the base in preparation. 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.
