Building a Better City from the Ground Up Part 2

In the last article I talked about how I've wanted to take the Cities of Death experience and make it feel more like you're battling in an actual city rather than a haphazard maze of buildings and detritus. I started off the project by discussing the movement trays that I built to contain my buildings. Today I'm working on painting some of those movement trays so lets take a look. Now I will note that this is all probably much easier with an airbrush but since my first attempt airbrushing something a few years ago was a complete failure, I haven't touched it since. Instead, I do layers of over brushing and dry brushing combined with washes to create the look of my sidewalks. Here's a quick overview:

To start I painted the entire base with black paint. I did this by hand because spray paint would melt my exposed foamcore sides.

Next I over brushed dark grey. I used Americana brand Graphite colored craft paint. Essentially its Abaddon Black mixed with a lighter grey.

 Next I dry brushed Apple Barrel brand Blue Stoneware over that. Think something along the lines of The Fang - a dark blue/grey.

Then I dry brushed again with Apple Barrel brand Country Grey. This is more of a black based grey akin to Dawnstone or Administratum Grey.

This next layer was a mix of a bunch of colors to approximate Bleached Bone/Ushabti Bone.

To help pick out the sidewalk blocks and add a level of realism I washed Gryphonne Sepia into the cracks though any brown wash would do.

To strengthen that definition and add more detail to the gravel patches I then washed the cracks and gravel with Badab Black/Nuln Oil.It should be noted that the dark grey dome will get hit with some sort of metallic and highlighted but this movement tray is essentially done. 

This is the layout of this particular tournament board. As you can see there are an assortment of different sized trays in various states of completion. Essentially there are two that need the full treatment starting with over brushing/dry brushing, and the rest just need various levels of detailing.

Here's a close-up of a major intersection. The two lane highway has Imperial Eagle decals for added effect, and the narrower street actually has little red arrow decals to show the direction of traffic. The crosswalks and lane dividers are not actually painted on either. They are strips of card stock I glued down because I didn't feel like messing with stenciling them on. To blend it all together various greys were stippled over the lines and decals.

You'll notice in these pictures shading in the gutters. I washed Badab Black along the gutters and added some random staining in the streets. As I work along other splashes of black, brown, and green wash will be added to represent various types of street filth. 

What do you think so far? Does it feel more like a cityscape?

In part 3 I'll talk about detailing the buildings and stretching the value of your Cities of Death buildings. Thanks for reading. -Nick