Well, it’s been a while, hasn’t it?
During my most recent visit, my brother-in-law very generously gave me some of his tools he didn’t need anymore, including one of his airbrushes, a Paasche VL (whose past life is on display). And for Fathers’ Day, my delightful wife gave me a compressor to drive it.
AkiPla Before
I put the new airbrush and compressor to immediate use this weekend, putting down base color on the streets and sidewalks in front of AkibaPla. To the left is the “before” shot: Akiba Plaza (notice the new walls) set on a scale printout of its surroundings drawn from Google Maps. Having this scale drawing has proved immensely useful it getting everything laid out, and cut to the right shape. I’ll use it again to make stencils for the street markings.
AkiPla After
And with the various bits of painted plastic in place. This is just a base coat; they have a lot of work left to do. The streets will actually be asphalt-colored (the curbs are concrete, which is why the whole thing is grey here), and will need a stencil so I can add street markings. The sidewalks will be shaded and highlighted to draw out the surface detail in the molded plastic.
Yellow Guide Strips
None of the parts are glued down yet, so it looks a little rough, but everything will fit together very snugly. And yes, I really am hand-placing strips those yellow textured tiles you see everywhere in Tokyo to help guide the blind. I think they are quite distinctive, and important to include. After a lot of deliberating about how to model them, I settled on using sheets of Evergreen 1.6mm square tile, cut into strips. I won’t bother trying to actually model the raised bumps on each tile, that’s just too small for my hand.
I’ve got a lot of sidewalk left to cut out and paint, and much painting to go on what I’ve already cut out. After that: Streetlamps and stoplights!
Looking awesome! I am really looking forward to your progress on this!
I love my airbrush too…except for the cleaning part!
Your brother-in-law does some pretty cool work too!
Question for you….how do you plan to do all of your street markings? I’ve been trying to find some kind of tape to use for masking or the lines themselves, but haven’t had much luck.
Perhaps I’ll post this over at JNS.
My plan is to design the marks on the computer, print them out and affix them to maybe manilla paper (like cardstock)? Then cut those out and use the manilla paper as a stencil for airbrushing the marks on. The nice thing about all the markings in the real parking lot is that they were done the same way (but larger), so none of them (even the katakana “タクシー”) are very complex.