Mega City One Spring Clean Challenge

I did almost nothing that I talked about doing in the previous entry. While underpainting in pink does work well for yellow, it gives the yellow a golden hue. I’m looking for more of a sickly institutional yellow, but I found that mixing in just a hint of black and painting over a light grey base coat is giving me the look I want.

Adding the “scratched paint over metal” look is providing just the right amount of detail, but it’s also taking forever to do. I’ll have to see if I can come up with a faster way to do it for the other building, and when/if I repaint the first one.

I decided not to make the door openable, but I did add a countertop to the service window.

I’ve got the roof assembled other than the sign. the kit came with a sticker sheet with different Dredd-themed signs, but I don’t really like any of the choices for the larger building so I’m thinking of trying to come up with something myself.

Next up: final assembly!

I’ve taken the huge first step of opening the package for the larger retail unit. It’s pretty similar to the storage unit I’ve already done, but that was quite some time ago so I don’t really remember how it fits together.

It looks like I may have been too clever for my own good in making the door on the storage unit openable. Should I bother doing that with the two retail buildings? If I do it’ll be complicated by the fact that each retail building has two doors: a normal sized door and a wider shutter for the service window. I’m thinking I may make the normal door openable, but either fix the shutter or do away with it entirely. I definitely want at least one of the buildings to have an open service window — I’ll paint the interior in a different color to provide some contrast.

Speaking of color, I’ve decided on yellow for the buildings, and now I’m remembering how difficult yellow paint can be as it tends to be very transparent. On previous Sarissa kits I’ve used cheap craft paint, reasoning that it would take too much miniature paint to cover such a large area. But what I seem to always conveniently forget is that the coverage on those cheap craft paints is pretty awful, so I’m having to spend time on multiple coats. It’s bad enough with grey, but just impossible with yellow which offers no coverage at all.

After giving up on the craft paint I switched to my usual miniature paint, in this case a Reaper mustard yellow that I reasoned would cover the MDF okay. After two coats I’ve blown through half the bottle and coverage is still pretty blotchy, so I’m going to have to rethink.

The kit includes some cardboard pieces meant to provide surface detailing. I tried coloring those with a Prismacolor marker and that actually looks pretty good and goes really quickly. I think a quick drybrush with a lighter yellow will have the cardboard bits looking the way I want them to.

I set aside the project for the day to work on other things, and later on inspiration hit me. I recalled that pink is a good underpaint color for yellow — I had tried this for the first time with some Star Wars Shatterpoint handmaidens and the results were pretty good. Even better, for quite some time Reaper was throwing in a free bottle of pink paint (for breast cancer awareness) with every order, so I have several bottles of pink that I hadn’t previously envisioned a use for.

Later in the evening additional inspiration hit, in the form of this week’s episode of The Bad Batch. Part of the story takes place in a cargo bay with some yellow and grey crates in the background. The shapes and detailing are similar to the buildings I’m working on, and I like the look of them. Plus it would involve painting most of the MDF parts dark grey instead of yellow, which should be a lot easier and quicker.

More years ago than I care to admit I bought Sarissa’s Judge Dredd bundle, which consists of 3 buildings plus some rooftop gantries and stairs. I assembled and painted one of them but I’m not overly thrilled with the results. I was going for a concrete look similar to what we see in the Karl Urban Dredd film, but in practice I’m finding that it looks a little dull, and I think I overdid it trying to bring out a stippled texture on the MDF. It was a surprising amount of work for a mediocre result.

In thinking about it, I’ve decided that I want to go for a much more comic book look for the other two buildings. The natural inclination for futuristic buildings is to go with grey and silver, but it’s pretty boring to paint and I’m noticing that they rarely do that in the Judge Dredd comics. I also really like the board for Osprey’s Helter Skelter game (the Judge Dredd version of Wildlands) so I’m looking at at the color choices there for inspiration.

My plan is to build and paint the other two buildings with the new color scheme in mind, and then repaint or at least touch up the one I’ve already done to make sure they all look consistent.

The last time I played the Warlord Judge Dredd game was in 2021, and I have a vague memory of it being a little unsatisfying. I remember thinking it was a little tedious that it took four dice rolls to make an attack: I have to succeed at an attack roll, my opponent has to fail their defense roll, I then have to make a damage roll, and my opponent makes a roll to resist the damage. I freely admit that my memory of the game is pretty vague, so I want to give it another try, which will be the last part of this spring clean challenge — I’ll write up a battle report here and do a proper review of the game on my blog.