Right off the bat it's a little challenging just to get the basic shape, in this case the building material was placed there rather than just left where it was demolished. I started off by using the green floural styrefoam blocks that you can get almost anywhere that sells artifical flowers. I glued the blocks in-place using adhesive caulk, once dried a used and old steak knife to give the pile it's basic shape. Next using my fingers I pressed in on the foam to give the seperately placed pile look. This is the nice thing about using the floural foam, when you press in on it, it stays.
Next, I painted the pile with black latex paint, while the paint was still very wet I sprinkeled in the metia material that I wanted to used to simulate broken blocks. To this point everything was going well. Now came coloring the blocks, initially I decided to heavily dry brush the piles using the colors to represent blocks, red oxide for red brick and light gray for cinder blocks. The dabbling of yellow you see in the pictures was to resimble pianted cinder block walls. Well It just didn't look quite right, when my buddy Mark Gugliotta came over I asked him for his opinion. He said try and repaint the piles the solid colors first, then due a black wash. Well as you can see by the photos I'm just now starting to do that. I'll follow-up in the next post how that turns out, hey lets face it, it never hurts to someone elses opinion on something.
The reason I haven't got around yet to repaint the piles of broken up blocks is beacuse I've been working on another project. Creating a new sign for one of buildings. I wanted to put a sign the building that I downloaded from the internet some time back. Most of you probably saw it. It was a website that you could a "Pennsy" style sign for whatever you wanted. In this case the sign fits my mills name perfectly "Keystone Speciality Metals". I think the sign came out pretty well, what do you think? Here's how I did it.
Once I settled on the proper sized sign I printed it out. In this case I didn't print it out on any special paper. Using semi-gloss paint in a pray can, sprayed over the sign lightly and let dry, you don't want the ink to start flowing (smugging). I repeated this step two more times until I felt I had a good finish. By the way, this is still on the 8.5 X 11 sheet of paper, you do not want to cut it out at this point.
Once thoroughly dry, you are going to turn the paper over, using a water and detergent mixture you are going to wet the paper down all around the printed sign. Let it soak for about 30 seconds and begin sanding off the paper, I use 320 grit sand paper. You want to remove as much material as possible to make it very thin. In a since you are making a decal, the clear coat is protecting your image. once you feel you've achieved the look you want set the sign aside and let thoroughly dry.
Once your sign is dry go ahead and cut it out. Now comes the tricky part, putting on the adhesive to make it stick. Because I'm placing the sign on plastic I used a spray adhesive like 3M's spray adhesive 77. You need to spray your adhesive on very sparingly, beacuse if you want it to conform to the base material you are going to have to press in on it. Yes, it will start spreading from behind the film so be careful. The spray adhesive I use takes time for it to completely dry. So, after and hour or so I went back over the sign pressing it into the metal siding. In the picture you can see the verticul lines, and "yes" you can see where I put a couple of holes in the sign. In my case, I'm OK with that. This takes a little practice so you might want to try it on some scrap siding before you place it on one of your showcase model. If you have any questions or suggestions I'm all ears, good luck. Oh and by the way sorry for any mis-spelling, I didn't have time to do a spell check.
