Collins builds the world of The Walking Dead

Brace yourself… these are possibly the worst looking sofas known to man. I asked my wife which contrast colour to use and she said ‘go for the Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen hideous purple one’ aka magos purple. so now we have a tyranid sofa set in this gaudy house…

another simple paintjob. just the contrast paints i have in stock and then some ‘3 dabbing’ to make bee shapes, sort of.

I’m really surprised the owner of this house didn’t survive the apocalypse. they had literally everything they needed. loads of food on the shelves, boxes full of stuff, GerryCan of fuel and a gun safe stuffed with automatic weapons and side arms. To top it off they even have some computer games to keep them entertained too…

These were all whatever contrast paints i had in stock, random colours that looked roughly right, different browns for the cardboard, reds blues and yellows for the tinned food. eg yellow bottle with blue lid for the bleach bottle etc. I did use german grey and grey white for the packing labels for the cardboard boxes to represent stickers and delivery addresses. I think i went a bit too dark on the gun cabinet though, went for a grey/blue metal for it, but it does look a bit of dark blob and you cant see the guns that easily at a glance. C’est le vie

This was entirely done using contrast paints and relatively rapidly too in an evening between dog walks and bedtime routine for the kids etc.

quick block colours and a bit of minor patterning using contrast paint on the plates. gives them a good impression of what it should be (highlights the shapes) quickly but will never detract from the miniatures that will be on the board in front of them. perfect for background scatter/detailing.

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.