Collins builds the world of The Walking Dead

this sheet was downloaded from the mantic’s walking dead fanatics page for free!

printed it off and tea stained it to get rid of the harsh white paper colour, this is a necessary step i feel to stop the jarring that would occur with fresh white paper. make sure the tea bag you use hasn’t been made in a mug with milk added, it will go horribly mouldy. Be civilised and use one from a full pot of tea.

you could try and place stuff nicely but that doesnt look real or random, i have a good way to achieve this. take your debris, hold it a good distance above (68.3cm above to be precise) and simply drop it. they’ll drop and flutter and end up all over the place. then simply PVA glue them down where they fell. if it looks pants, repeat process, or simply blow air over it to move them. simple.

all this paper work and painting has been completed since friday. I spent quite a lot of time on it to be fair (one day off and 3 evenings).

I’m very happy with how its come out so far, i’m within sight of the finished product! i simply need to add in the furniture and then find some appropriate debris to scatter to the winds to make it look like a lived in environment.

If you didn’t spot the penis, the reason for it (other than obvious childishness) is to create a different and odd way to determine priority on turn one… ‘whoever finds the cock goes first!’. I did a similar thing with the previous board but used the dog model, and before that the graffiti in the gas station.

remember this entry where i did some googling for wallpaper patterns.

well now i have them printed and am at the point to use them its time to chop them up and stick them down

This is a time consuming but relatively easy step. the problem is to find stuff that matches, or at least doesnt clash (unless you want it to). it felt a little bit like playing SIMs back in the early 2000s.

With the garage floor i deliberately chose a horrible pattern. the idea being that the owner took it out of their kitchen from the 60s, 70s or 80s (sometime ghastly for interior design) and dumped in their garage as a somewhat better alternative to bare concrete.

The road looks like a big blob of (well shaded and weathered) grey.

It needs some markings, so off to google maps and streetview i went to see what the road markings in Atlanta and Woodbury are in actual real life USA. Turns out, the Americans only mark half their roads, and only if they feel like it… often the suburban areas and cul-de-sacs aren’t marked.

I decided to simply copy some stuff from more main roads, a double yellow down the middle and a white stop line.

When i finished the rough grass i looked at the board and though, ‘something’s missing’.

I went back to the reference images (see previous post) and saw that height and line of sight blocking stuff wasn’t there, primarily trees. It added a 3rd height level and a bit more of nature.

I went digging in my garage for my old 4ground trees (which i think are HEKI trees) and threw 3 poplar trees down in a very definite straight line, as if they had been deliberately placed when the estate was built.

I had to super glue (lots) them down and then go over the top of their bases using more PVA, flock and ISO.

So the plan here is to do the following.

• lay down (paint on) PVA
• sprinkle on (at least) two types of flock
• spray ISO
• Pipette on heavily watered down PVA
• leave to dry.

pretty simple really. in reality you need to work in sections and always paint a wider area than you plan to flock until the whole area is done. That way you wont get any horrible tide marks in your flockwork.

the reason for using at least two types of flock is simply for variety. if you look in your garden, you’ll see its not just grass, there are weeds, random growth and moss too. it’ll help it look natural and realish and thus be a more easy to believe lawn. I’ll put bigger clumps down to simulate a lawn that has not been mown recently (after all, the world ended and nobody cuts the grass when they’re dead… they usually just prop up the daisies)

the ISO was a bit of a knobber on this one. not only did it affect one of the houses (i took steps to protect the other ones when i noticed it) but it also played around with the weathering on the road.

ARGH! not much that i can or will do about it though, i’ll just have to leave it as is and suck it up.

doesn’t the grass look nice though

This post was basically a whole days work.

If i was to do this again, i would not build all the building onto the board until they are already painted. it was very much a ball ache to work on this 20×20 inch monster and try to do fine detail work whilst balancing the whole board on its side. i think i got over excited in the building it phase and forgot the colouring in phase.

the roadway was painted the wrong way at first. light base dark highlight. it looked fine, but plainly wrong. i quickly swapped it over before doing any weathering steps. good job i caught it really as it would be a small annoyance forever otherwise.

first came a little bit of research, not much, just a google search for ‘suburban american house’.

I selected 3 photos (above) to be the indicators but i did show me that there doesnt have to be a theme like in the UK. often in the UK you have streets of houses that all look similar and in somecases regionalised. eg cotswold stone in the cotswolds, burning poop filled paper bag houses in birmingham etc. i dont know for sure but i expect it is because the UK has actual history and most of the buildings there are older than the US. The village i grew up in has a church that is at least 4 times older than the USA.