Mega City One Spring Clean Challenge

I’ve taken the huge first step of opening the package for the larger retail unit. It’s pretty similar to the storage unit I’ve already done, but that was quite some time ago so I don’t really remember how it fits together.

It looks like I may have been too clever for my own good in making the door on the storage unit openable. Should I bother doing that with the two retail buildings? If I do it’ll be complicated by the fact that each retail building has two doors: a normal sized door and a wider shutter for the service window. I’m thinking I may make the normal door openable, but either fix the shutter or do away with it entirely. I definitely want at least one of the buildings to have an open service window — I’ll paint the interior in a different color to provide some contrast.

Speaking of color, I’ve decided on yellow for the buildings, and now I’m remembering how difficult yellow paint can be as it tends to be very transparent. On previous Sarissa kits I’ve used cheap craft paint, reasoning that it would take too much miniature paint to cover such a large area. But what I seem to always conveniently forget is that the coverage on those cheap craft paints is pretty awful, so I’m having to spend time on multiple coats. It’s bad enough with grey, but just impossible with yellow which offers no coverage at all.

After giving up on the craft paint I switched to my usual miniature paint, in this case a Reaper mustard yellow that I reasoned would cover the MDF okay. After two coats I’ve blown through half the bottle and coverage is still pretty blotchy, so I’m going to have to rethink.

The kit includes some cardboard pieces meant to provide surface detailing. I tried coloring those with a Prismacolor marker and that actually looks pretty good and goes really quickly. I think a quick drybrush with a lighter yellow will have the cardboard bits looking the way I want them to.

I set aside the project for the day to work on other things, and later on inspiration hit me. I recalled that pink is a good underpaint color for yellow — I had tried this for the first time with some Star Wars Shatterpoint handmaidens and the results were pretty good. Even better, for quite some time Reaper was throwing in a free bottle of pink paint (for breast cancer awareness) with every order, so I have several bottles of pink that I hadn’t previously envisioned a use for.

Later in the evening additional inspiration hit, in the form of this week’s episode of The Bad Batch. Part of the story takes place in a cargo bay with some yellow and grey crates in the background. The shapes and detailing are similar to the buildings I’m working on, and I like the look of them. Plus it would involve painting most of the MDF parts dark grey instead of yellow, which should be a lot easier and quicker.