Shoe's 30 for 30, day 4

Dirty:  check

Day 4 is unsurprisingly finishing the base and painting the day 3 build.  I wanted the building to look worn in, both dirty and weathered.  I got the dirty part (more than I wanted) but not quite enough on the weathered part. I'm not entirely happy with it and will probably repaint pieces of it later.

This base is cropped close to the building which contains just enough medium weight chipboard to reach the edges.  I textured the ground floor with the Flagstone textured rolling pin from Green Stuff World.  I don't really like chipboard for this purpose, though this one turned out OK.  It likes to warp when painted/glued/anything involving moisture.  I know a lot of folks use MDF for this, but I don't have a table or jig saw so that's not really an option at the moment.

To begin the painting process, everything gets mod podged which can take a while to dry (I did this last night).  Then we paint with craft paints.  If there's a thing that's more bullshit than shingles, and I'm not saying there is, it's craft paint.  I don't like craft paint.  I mean, no one should be surprised by this since I'm so picky about miniature paints which are on the whole a heck of a lot more consistent.  The ones I'm using, a mix of Apple Barrel, Folk Art, Americana and Craft Essentials which I can't find a link for, are at best unpredictable.  The only thing going for craft paints is their price.  The Apple Barrel ones I've been buying are currently 50 cents at Walmart which is really hard to argue with.  I may start using my Badger Minitaire paints on terrain though that's comparatively super expensive.

Base coat complete.

I am not a good painter and I think it shows.  As much time as I took to make sure that the timbers were properly covered, I still wasn't super precise and the wash really failed to bring out much if any detail.  That's super disappointing and part of why I don't like painting as much as building.  One thing I did here that I was happy with was blending the color on the shingles the base which I think turned out well.  Then I ruined it all with a lousy wash.  I will probably pitch the washes I've been using as they aren't really working.

Light dry brushing applied.

It's interesting how many of my least favorite bits of a build end up near the end.  Shingles, as previous mentioned, are bullshit.  Mod podging isn't so bad, but painting super is.  In fact, I didn't want to paint so much that I went through a phase of printing out top down color images and gluing them to stacked cardboard tiles instead of doing anything fancy.  I got better.  I find it odd that I hate painting terrain but like mini painting.

All told, painting and mod podging took something like 6 hours not including drying time.  That, with the previous 10 hours puts the total build at ~16 hours.  Again, I'm pretty sure the next one will go a lot faster given how much I learned on this build.  Tomorrow will probably be something simpler.