Eager to ‘get out of town’, I’ve started a push to finish up my small residential community. While I’m not a big ‘super-detail’ fan, I do think there are some basic things that all structures need in order to blend then satisfactory into their surroundings – namely weathering. I didn’t want to spend too much time aging the buildings so I decided to settle on the technique I used here for all the buildings and call it a day.

As before, I applied a wash of rubbing alcohol/India ink to the structure using a soft brush and allowed the wash to flow into all of the nooks and crannies. I used a cotton swap to remove any excess and blot away any streaks. Happy with the overall effect, I again turned my attention to the windows. As before, I glazed the windows using some acetate, and added some blinds with regular bond paper.

I added some weeds around the base of the buildings. I find that often time modelers don’t really ‘ground’ their buildings, and an unrealistic gap is formed between the base of the building and the scenery that creates the illusion that the building is floating. Rather then attempt to add ground foam around the base of each house with a pair of tweezers after each house had been installed on the layout, I opted to glue weeds around the perimeter of each house before installing them. I brushed on a thin coat of white glue to the base of each structure and added some course ground foam.

I test fit each of the buildings, and added scenery material where necessary before soaking the entire area with wet water. I placed the building in their final locations and saturated everything with dilute white glue / water. The foam as the base of the buildings wicked up the glue and ‘pulled’ the base of the buildings into the scenery. I’ll need to wait for the glue to dry to see the results, but currently everything looks good.

Only one house and one warehouse left to build. I really should order more windows!