HUMVEEs and MDF Scenery

Bit of a mixed bag this week. Some more airbrushing adventures and my first dabble with MDF scenery.

HUMVEEs

The Humvees were bought at different shows in different years, so I don't know who the manufacturers are, although I think one may be Britannia. However, my airbrush practise needed some new victims and they'll be useful for Zombie scenarios, so I decided it was time to paint them.

They are both resin and took quite a lot of filling - along with the usual air bubbles I ended up having to rebuild the front light on one of them. There were two parts whose purpose I had never figured out. I had assumed they were front and back bumpers, but they looked very silly in that position. I was about to bin them when I picked up the Osprey HUMVEE book, and opening to the first picture I realised they were part of the wheel suspension gubbins. I really should have sanded them down, but neither model is particularly high quality, so it's unlikely to be noticed.

The wheels were painted separately, which just made things easier. As with my previous models, I used Tamiya Acrylics, as they're brilliant for airbrushing (although utter rubbish for brush painting).

I wanted the vehicles to look quite weathered and rusty, so I applied a red-brown undercoat, sealed it, applied AK Productions' Chipping Solution and then painted on the base colour. Much scrubbing with a stippling brush created a worn surface (even though it doesn't really show in the pictures below).

Extra rust was added using Vallejo SS Camo Brown, applied with a bit of torn off foam from a blister pack. Vallejo Red-Orange was applied over the top of the Camo Brown to try to give the impression of more recent rust.

I wanted them to look mud splashed, but after numerous applications of brown washes (AK Productions and MIG) and burnt umber oil paint (Winsor & Newton), it still doesn't look quite as dirty as I'd hoped.

I washed the windows with Testor's Dust, and painted in the shape that would have been cleared by the windscreen wipers. However, again, it's not really visible unless you know what you're looking for, and even then it helps if you're wearing an Optivisor.

MDF Scenery

I've never been sure if MDF scenery was for me or not. However, having seen some posts on it recently, I decided to give it a try. I got a building as a present for my birthday, but it was more complicated than I wanted to attempt, so I picked up a basic Sarissa one to use as a guinea pig.

I bought some cheap craft paints and did a couple of tests on some spare MDF cavalry bases. These suggested that the paints would be fine, but that I was going to need several coats.

I built the building first, mainly so that painting the joints would be easier. I'm not sure it really makes much difference whether they're built or painted first, so I'll probably stick to this approach. The other thing I did was add window sills and door frames from plasticard. I find the MDF buildings look quite flat, so this added a bit of relief to them. I decided not to do corner blocks on the building (not sure of the proper term for those), but may do so next time.

I started with the roof, and it really soaked up the paint, so much so that the first coat disappeared. It took me three coats to get a half decent cover, so I decided to try a different approach with the other pieces. I bought some cheap white Gesso from The Works and applied it as an undercoat. I think this definitely helped, although it still took a couple of coats to cover properly. I recently bought some MDF sealer, so it'll be interesting to see how that compares to the Gesso approach.

I experimented with different types of paint: the aforementioned craft paints, a tube of Liquitex Heavy Body Acrylic, a tube of Liquitex Soft Body Acrylic and some tubes of what claimed to be Medium Body Acrylics. They all seemed to be pretty much the same, so I'll stick to the craft paints unless I need a colour I don't have. I did do the window frames with Citadel Fortress Grey, and that didn't work as well as the other makes.

I weathered it using a mix of FW Acrylic Burnt Umber ink and Liquitex Transparent Raw Sienna ink. I then went back over a number of bricks to strengthen the colour and to break up the building. Annoyingly, this ended up being very close to the colour I used for the window sills, so they've pretty much disappeared.

The pavement was painted in light grey craft paint and washed with a mix of FW Black and White Acrylic inks (to give a dark grey).

I'm fairly happy with the outcome, although I would have liked the building to be more sandstone coloured. As mentioned, the window sills disappeared after the ink washes, so I'm going to do them a different colour next time.

The interiors were just left with plain blocks of colour on the walls and floors, and I didn't even bother shading or highlighting them. For gaming purposes, I'm thinking about treating the interiors the same way Zombicide does, which would involve printing out some top down room plans and dropping them in when required. There's no great hurry for this, however, and I haven't done any experiments yet.