The Bunker: Third Step: Wood to Paint

Sure, having a 150+ blocks lying around the house and parts for another 100 is fun…and disheartening at the same time, so I stored the lot in several big boxes and focussed on other things (more about that later)

A few weeks ago though, I walked past the local home improvent store, and noticed a big sign with “Closing sale – 30-50% discount” on it. Never one to pass a bargain I went in and came out with, amongst other things, a overly large bucket of grey wood primer/basecoat/ you know what I mean. And that weekend, I opened one of the boxes, dragged the lot back upstairs and sanded and cleaned the parts in preparation for an evening of nothing but basing. One box, lot of wood, nothing better to do equals a lot of pre-finished tiles.

So you’ve got yourself a stack of grey painted modules….then grab your pencil and put down a grid on each module, and repreat that proces on the walls and underneath most of the parts as well. Again, a lot of work, and not every position was easy to reach, but I did manage to get the first 25 blocks done this way, so I can now sit down after dinnertime to relax for an hour or so painting concrete. Jay…..

In order to speed up that process a bit but still get convincing concrete I looked at….concrete :). Do you have any idea how much that stuff varies? As it will be the inside of a bunker mostly I went with a white-blue-grey -ish mix of colours, settling on the following colours, namely : VMC 164 Dark Bluegrey for the basewash and VMC 153 Pale Greyblue or VMC 156 US Bluegrey Pale for the whitish look. No mixing whatsoever, all the diff in colour you see is done by changing the amount of water in the paint mix and leaving it on the board for anything as short as 5 seconds to a minute. The longer u wait the more pronounced the white lines will be. VMC 164 Dark Bluegrey was used to accentuate some of the lines between the concrete, but not everywhere. I’ll propably do a Tutorial for this at a late date.

Here are a few examples:

I have plenty of variation in the concrete, depending on my mood and time the concrete can look anything from pristine to sloppy….but it all ties in together just as I had hoped, and paints up rather quickly…thank God.

Johan

The Bunker: Second step: Paper to wood

With all of the parts I then wanted cut and glued together I ended up with these boxes and variations thereof:

The 10×20 block is one I made to save myself the time to make 2 smaller 10×10 blocks. Not included in this shot are 10×10 filler blocks with no walls whatsoever as a sheet of wood looks like…a sheet of wood 😆

Johan