Cyberpunk Urban Growth with 144artist

I’ve been looking at any reference material I can find for the White Dragon Noodle Bar from Bladerunner.  This includes images from the computer game from 20+ years ago.  I decided to keep the colors fairly basic as I am going to weather it a great deal and want to focus on the signage.  This is important as I have no neon sign for the roof yet.

I decided to go with red background for the name and a black background for the mascot.  I’ve included a couple of my reference shots.  This is just the base coats so I am hopeful it will all come together well with the highlights, details, and weathering.

While I do not claim to engage in the hobby of 3D printing several of my friends do and they share their left over spools with me.  I’ve got a nice size collection going as I have this long running plan to make more spools into terrain and my friends print a lot.  I also own a fair number of wooden discs of various sizes as I want different diameter bases and tops for different spools to break things up visually.  Looking at my choices I set aside the two cardboard spools and the clear plastic one to focus on the black ones.  Of the six, four are identical and shorter while the other two match each other and are a little taller.

So with all these spools available to me, after a day of messing around I settled on using some of my 12 inch discs to make a spool shape from scratch.  It’s just that I had a number of big pieces I really wanted to use but they wouldn’t really fit on the spools.  This also gave me the opportunity to create terrain that miniatures could move through, not just around and over.

One of the challenges I like to set myself is to reuse or repurpose junk, off cuts, and broken items.  My partner got a new blowdryer recently and didn’t need the comb attachment.  I immediately thought it looked like a ladder and set it aside for such use.  This “spool” seemed the perfect opportunity.

Assembling all these MDF kits means one has a bunch of offcuts left afterward.  I had two long pieces with rounded ends left from the DL HQ building as well as all those pieces from the windows.  My first thought was a ladder but decided on stairs instead.

As previously posted, I chose not to use any of the spools I had collected so far and just built my own.  This sort of thing can happen when one has way too much collected in “Bits Boxes”.  I really like the pass through in this piece and know I will need to make more like it.  I have a bunch of old “manipulatives” from a Math teacher who retired that made nice walls so know they will be included in more of my future constructions.  The grid pattern and uniform sized pieces are rather handy.  I have an idea to adapt wooden ones for planters.

Most everything was attached with hot glue.  A few of the tiny details were superglued in place.  I kept the details fairly large as I want this one to paint up quickly.  Primed the entire thing black from every direction before applying a zenithal layer in grey.  I love how pieces look once they are primed.

I have been a public school teacher for over twenty years now.  When other teachers retire they get rid of everything they have stored away in their rooms.  Often times this includes odds and ends that are no longer used.  One such math teacher had a great collection of what are called manipulatives, 3D objects that can help students understand abstract concepts.  There are a few different sets with some being made out of plastic (I used a few of those on my homemade spool) and others being wooden.  The latter is what I used for these planters.  After cutting one made of oak in half, I realized the other set was plywood which will be far easier to cut.

Drybrushed the planters with light grey and then white before weathering with a bit of Agrax Earthshade.  The grid on the pieces make placing the drilled holes easier. I have a big bag of plastic bamboo left over from the samurai terrain I built ages ago which were perfect for this project.  I used the same Tacky Glue to attach the stalks into the holes. I am still undecided what I will cover the ground with.  I had considered just water but am not in the mood for a resin pour right now.

Really busy day so got little time at the painting desk but I did finish painting and planting the last two of my planters.  Now they need some kind of soil or rocks.  I will be looking through my collection of such tonight.

Started the detail painting on my noodle bar.  Since I failed to do much with it during the Spring Clean Challenge I am determined to finish it this season.  I continued weathering the building and began on the signage.  I decided that matching any font at that size is just too hard so I focused on legibility.  I even got one of the White Dragon logos done though IO’m not entirely happy with it yet.